First Forage of the Year

 I am having a bit of an oniony year so far : yesterday I repotted my collection of  foraged or donated onion family plants which include :

Allium ursinum : wild garlic : just coming into leaf :

An elephant garlic from last year : Allium ampeloprasum : quite big, if not quite elephantine enough to harvest

Allium proliferum : Egyptian walking onion : teeny, but the name gives me high hopes of it proliferating!

Three cornered leek : Allium triquetum : looking strong.

Then after my meeting in Walthamstow, of which more later, I cycled along the path that goes through the churchyard of St Mary’s and found this lovely patch of something definitely allious :  which I am not entirely sure which it is : it looks most like 3 cornered leek, but with flatter leaves than my potted ones : it is in the churchyard, under a tree, so maybe richer soil accounts for the difference.

I picked a handful, to make risotto, maybe, or pesto, or perhaps an adapted east end sauce for sausages like the parsley ‘liquor’ you get with eels. Any recipe suggestions greatly appreciated!

This plant is an interesting example of perennials producing useful food, when the sun has only just come out, and annuals are still mostly curled tightly asleep in their seeds : although me and my son have started some pumpkin and black bean seeds on the windowsill :Cute, yes, but feed us, they won’t!

My project in Walthamstow, is with a care home, to help them with their sustainable garden project : It’s an interesting one, because of the potential to change the way a large organisation looks at landscape, and even the earth : but man, is it hard going! None of the people have any knowledge of permaculture, or even organic gardening,  and are doing a hard job for quite low pay : and the last thing I want to do is increase their workload. It would be easier, I realise, to set up a site and work with a small group of like minded individuals : which is an easily funded and much trodden route : Organiclea, Edible Landscapes etc. It would be like a perennial plant, with last year’s growth to build on, rather than an annual growing from seed, in what may turn out to be stony ground. Although before I star moaning too much, it occurs to me that Perennials are largely stuck, where they put down roots, whereas the seeds of my project in its year can potentially reach further :  as far as the birds and wind will take them.

One at a time…

I became a landscape architect, way back in 1999 ( yes, I partied) because I wanted to work on projects to transform the environment, and empower communities to engage with changing their place for the better. One of the first projects I worked on was the forecourt of a call centre somewhere in Scotland. I never visited the site : why bother, there was nothing there but an area of grass overlooking the River Tay. What my employer wanted, thinking back, was a quickly produced, cheap to build, turning area for cars that would look nice in front of the building, and require no maintenance. What I did instead, and which was probably chucked out as soon as I resigned in a huff, was created a break out area, for the call centre staff to be able to commune with nature in their breaks. I struggled like this for about 15 years, trying to find the space for people and nature in what was supposed to be an environmental design profession, and not really succeeding. I wanted to work together with communities to design spatial solutions that worked to improve people’s lives, not just produce attractive images for publication : aesthetic design / landscape as art was fine as far as it went, but to me seemed shallow :

http://www.landscapeinstitute.org/news/Proposal-for-Silvertown-Docks-wins-Royal-Docks-competition

Then in 2005, everything changed. I had a baby, did my maternity leave, and found that the worth of my many skills was invalidated by my need to work ‘part-time’, which in architecture means having to leave the office, not just at a regular time, but basically ever. The fact that this causes a skills drain is the subject of regular bemused hand-wringing in the professional and mainstream press :

http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/aug/07/women-leaving-architecture-profession

I am and have always been, incredibly ambitious : On the last day of college I had a conversation about aspirations with a fellow landscape graduate, that has stuck with me : I was not intent on a particular area of design, but I did want to do useful public projects that would be significant to real people. She replied, ” I am sorry, but I really look down on those kind of ‘worthy’ projects : I am much more into minimalist design”, which one sentence would be a whole blogsworth of unpicking in itself. But, she is probably at least the head of a practice landscape team that…yawn. Sorry, what was I saying?

If anything, I have got more ambitious, while earning less money, and doing ‘lower status’ work : I work with people in urban areas to design and run sustainable systems for growing food and maintaining their landscape. Its a job that has no actual title : its permaculture, yes, but calling it that doesn’t necessarily help : I have settled for the moment on Community Landscape Architect ( I removed the ‘Chartered’, because that also doesn’t help.)  Why people think gardening is easy, I don’t know : the knowledge and experience you need to do everything well is perhaps why our best ones are the oldest!

This work is actually Revolution, but disguised, so as not to bring the government’s new water cannons out, as Gardening. My ultimate design would be a place that looked as if it has not been designed at all, but had occurred naturally : so that my peers, my boss, my trainer, and actually, my lunch are all Nature herself.

Every time someone says something like :”I have never thought about that before” or “I’ll remember that, next time”, or when people who scream at the sight of worms stop screaming, and start looking, I feel that I am helping to build the revolution, one thought at a time, and one person at a time, which is the most powerful way there is.

 

On yer Bike!

At God’s Own Junkyard, Walthamstow

I have been cycling in cities, mostly London,  for about 20 years, now, and by dint of a quite miraculous level of caution on my part, I am not dead!

Yet!

I live in North East London, and my most common cycle route is down the roman road which morphs from  Stamford Hill to Stoke Newington High St, then Kingsland Road, then maybe Shoreditch High St. Anyway, thankfully I don’t go that far, because it really gets a lot more dangerous with every change of name. There are a lot more cyclists on the road now, so we are all having to improve our skills of Phalanx cycling, a la Chinese, and I find I am joined by a lot more biking women these days, so welcome, ladies, and non-ladies to

Rachel’s Guide to Cycling Survival:

1.  Be Highly Visible : my bike is yellow, my hi-vis jacket is yellow, my panniers are, yes, they’re yellow. When I replace my recently stolen helmet, I am tempted to buy a yellow one.
2.  Don’t ever assume that the driver of a car has seen you, because there are any number of things they could be looking at, both inside and outside the car, such as their phone, their sat nav, their lunch, their radio settings, attractive people walking along the road, shops, the inside of their eyelids etc. Even if you are a blazing ball of fluorescent yellow, still, be ready to slam on those brakes at any second. You tube is full of entertaining little helmet-cam films of  drivers making life-threatening mistakes.
3.  If you keep only one thing on your bike honed for maximum performance, make it your brakes, for mine have saved my life on many an occasion.
4. Don’t trust other cyclists : YouTube is full of entertaining little windscreen-cam films of cyclists making life threatening mistakes. I’m sorry, but we have all seen people riding with headphones on, overtaking cyclists who are overtaking other cyclists, not looking behind before changing turning or pulling out, or indeed, ever. To be fair, many of them are new to two wheels, and haven’t passed cycling proficiency, as I have. Ok I failed first time for not looking behind after an emergency stop, but it was only because the instructor had emphasised its importance so much that I thought doing it would show an embarrassing lack of initiative.
5. Remember that most car drivers neither know nor care how to ride a bicycle. For example, I regularly get beeps and indignant gesticulations for waiting in the middle of the junction to turn right. Yes, you and I both know that’s the correct position, but honestly, I think we are alone.

I have noticed, though, that since the Olympics in 2012, there are a lot more bikes on the road. It wasn’t the inspiration of British medal success, because it happened before, when ‘they’ did something to traffic to make it more difficult for people to drive. I’m sorry I don’t have more precise information to support this, but I have always cycled, even when I was almost the only woman I ever saw on a bike in London, and everyone thought I was mad.

I had to travel on the Overground before 9am this morning, and based on that experience, I think we are on the verge of a revolution in cycling in London : how people can bear to start their day crushed in with everyone all up their aura like that I don’t know. If only they knew the joy / knife edge of London on a bike. We need to reach the tipping point, though, when so many people are cycling that vehicle drivers no longer feel able to cut us up / side swipe us / overtake and turn left, and that means numbers! Get that bike out of the shed and give it a spin!

Blaming the Victim

(This post was originally created in January 2014)

Someone on Change.org today wrongly thought I might like to sign a petition to BAN the tv programme “Benefits St”, a channel 4 bollox-umentary about a street in Birmingham where nearly everyone is on state aid of some kind. The reason being that people on twitter were against claimants and had lots of self righteous things to say about taxes, scroungers and, er, baseball bats.

People who like making sneering and aggressive comments on social media and forums actually aren’t the problem : except when their actions become criminal, of course, then they can be dealt with by the law, and we can all see how they deserve more pity than fear. Banning a programme because the people in it don’t like they way it was edited, seems like a bit of a dangerous precedent to set. And certainly against the rules of the ‘reality’ genre.

Blaming the victim is a response born of fear : whenever I hear someone is ill, I have to stop myself from criticising their lifestyle choices and reaching for the Echinacea. If it was their fault it won’t get you is the subconscious thought behind it, and lets face it, losing our jobs, and being forced to eke out our lives on the dole is something to make anyone who’s still got a job shiver a little ( and not just because they’ve turned the heating off to save money). “They” are lazy and stupid, with too many children, and greedy, and not from round here, and should be punished, and have their lives, and their children’s lives made more miserable than they already are : these first thoughts are the touch of the rosary, the extra step avoiding the crack in the pavement, the touch wood talisman that says there but for the grace of god. Except it’s not god, its a government that is just waiting for us to stop listening and think about something else, so it can hand over yet more millions to the already super-rich corporations and individuals, while the children of ordinary people are brought up with the double poverties of present resources and future opportunities. And saying its their own fault, and if they weren’t so fat and lazy they could be joining in the bonanza for the rich is nothing but a lie, because the jobs that would pay a single breadwinner enough to live on are gone, and there are no caps on landlords profits, and people largely have no choice.

Did you notice, by the way, the news last week that the FTSE 100 index, which shows how much the top companies in the economy are generating rose 14.4 percent last year? So large corporations are making huge profits : yay! Bankers are going to get huge bonuses! Yay! Food banks are booming!