Status & Sustainability

I have been thinking a lot recently about my change of career direction : I used to be a Landscape Architect, and now I am a community gardener. I never believed I could get so excited about composting and soil.

When I left college, my contemporaries were all interested in what they called ‘European minimalism’ ; aiming to design high status places in public squares, to work with rich developers and big name architects, and it was all about you getting to design something to show how good you are at design. I wanted to design meaningful places, and help to transform communities through transforming their public spaces : the kind of projects that proper designers looked down on, and probably still do.

It always worried me, that other people in my profession weren’t interested in the slightest in the environmental impact of their work, and I found it extraordinary that it was so difficult, not to mention much more expensive, to reuse or recycle materials already on site, or to specify materials with convincing low carbon credentials.

I am in many ways, much more comfortable in community gardening : I am constantly surprised that people know so little about how to grow food, but glad to be rediscovering my own knowledge, which has all come from experience. A little part of me, though, imagines what my ex-colleagues would think : they must all be earning loads, and working all hours, while I am scraping in a fraction of what I used to get, but still avoiding having to make my son do a 12 hour day so I can. I am thankful.

Can you smell the rain?

I was in Edmonton, North London, talking to a school gardening club about sustainable food growing the other day when I was asked this question : I must have been banging on, as I do,  about maintaining soil fertility, working with nature etc,  when one of the mums asked me this : “Is it true you can smell in the air when it is going to rain? Because all my friends say I am crazy, because I can tell”  and she literally punched the air, and said “Yessssssss” when I told her that you can definitely smell and feel moisture in the air ahead of rain, and that what the wind is doing is also a good indicator of local weather systems.

It reminded me again of how alienated most people are from their environment :  all other animals use their senses instinctively and without question : if they feel a storm coming, they want to take shelter.

If you grow up in the country, like I did (see below!), in the seventies, when parenting was a lot more ‘free range’ than now, then maybe it does give you more understanding of  how nature works. If you are out in the woods a mile from home without even an acrylic jumper,  some idea of how to anticipate weather systems can come in handy!

I don’t see, through my work with schools, very much awareness of  sustainable or whole life cycle growing systems, but an awful lot of “But can you buy that in B&Q?”, and ” we just wanted to grow something quickly, so the kids could see it”, and ” I don’t think we have time for that in the school day”.  But just teaching children that if you plant a seed and water it, it will grow, magical as it is, is only the beginning of the story.

I am happy that gardening is part of the national curriculum, and I appreciate that capitalism has burrowed into all our souls, and made us feel that we can have all that we want, right now and forever, but I think we need to teach the next generation that ensuring food security is not only more complex, but a lot more exciting than simply shopping in a different retail shed.