Month: August 2022

A new mum was left stunned after a judgy neighbor complained that her garden workouts sounded too “erotic”.

The woman from Scotland turned to Mumsnet for advice after the remark left her speechless. She told the platform that she had gotten into a morning exercise routine while her baby napped and her husband worked from home.

All was going well until her neighbor knocked and asked her to move the workouts inside as “they were trying to relax in their back garden in peace and watch their fish.”

Her husband heard the comment and “politely” told them she wasn’t making much noise. He highlighted, “it’s daylight, and we are entitled to work out in our garden,” before asking them what they will say when their daughter is older and playing outside.

The woman recalled the neighbors responding, “that’s different,” suggesting that her “panting noises were a bit ‘erotic sounding'”.

Their

Gardens often act as a middle ground between our built-up, manufactured indoor lives and the world outside. The garden, whether it is a few pots, an allotment or something much larger, is a tiny slice of the rest of the ecology of our globe – and it teaches us about the gossamer threads that hold these things together.

In the blast of the UK heatwave in July, we watched our gardens curl and crisp. Stalks bent and wilted; leaves scorched and then browned. How much of your green space survived depending on how you had been tending those delicate threads.

The next heatwave might last for longer. It might arrive with stronger winds, or leave behind wilder, wet days. The winter will present its own challenges – more flooding, perhaps, as baked-hard soils struggle to soak up the rain. We need to prepare; this weather isn’t going away. The

Botanists know it as hedge bindweed, Calystegia sepium. My grandmother, who fought to restrict its incursions into her flower borders, called it the devil’s guts. I may have inherited it from her, embedded in the root ball of a day lily that I took from her garden as a memento.

Hedge bindweed regenerates from the smallest root fragments. I’ve dug out yards of its brittle underground stems, which resemble white worms and exude milky latex when broken. William Withering, the 18th-century physician who discovered the medicinal properties of foxglove and was always on the lookout for other therapeutic native plants, advocated these as an alternative to scammony, a violent purgative extracted from roots of a related Middle Eastern species, and used to expel tapeworms. His patients must surely have wondered whether he had let loose the devil in their own guts.

The tips of bindweed’s stealthy climbing

A group of people who have advocated for more than a decade to turn Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Street into a 2.1-mile “green boulevard” gathered Thursday to celebrate having pieced together $31 million to begin the environmental and traffic safety project.

When it’s finished, they say, the “Spring Garden Street Connector” will link popular trails on the Schuylkill and Delaware River and feature parking-protected bicycle lanes, trees, easier access to SEPTA rail stations and bus stops, a new stormwater management system, and safety improvements at 22 intersections to make the corridor more walkable.

“There are six neighborhoods along this corridor, and Spring Garden Street has been a chasm between them — now it will be a connector,” said Patrick Starr, executive vice chair of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and a board member of the Circuit Trails. He’s acknowledged as a central player in assembling the coalition that has brought the

nwlnd architects creates tension between old and new

Emerging from its forested site in Bonheiden, BelgiumNWLND Architects’ Refuge is a composition of frames built of red concrete. The compact building occupies the wooded garden of a pre-existing villa, whose traditional materiality of red brick informed the defining red pigments of the new architecture.

Meanwhile, the rotated orientation of the Refuge follows the orthogonal order of the house along with the angle of the site’s boundaries, lending a compositional tension between the new, the old, and the previously unkept garden. The architects wrote: ‘It is a concrete container with precise openings that frame the landscape.’

images © Johnny Umans | @johnnyumans

refuge: an enclosed garden in the woods

Led by Bert Rogiers and Pieter Vandeputte, the design team at NWLND Architects programs its Refuge with a filtered swimming pond, bicycle shed, and storage room. The pavilion also

Kettal and Tectum’s indoor hydroponic garden combats cabin fever with office-grown veg

In the climate crisis landscape, we seem to be experiencing a shift; sustainability is now a widely accepted necessity, we’ve stopped talking about single-use plastic and are realising ideas at reducing (and undoing) our impact on the planet. We’re seeing aquaponic farming in cities, bridges made from manipulated vines, stone quarries turned into cultural spaces and houses designed to be overtaken by nature; these can all seem like grand gestures of sustainable innovation – gorgeous and important – but perhaps removed from what we can all hope to attain in our everyday lives.

Happily, Tectum Garden – recognising the cabin fever engendered in many of us by office life, the common craving for green oases, and

But not just any nursery.

Stitched between rolling apple orchards and redwood forests in rural Sonoma County is the Western Hills Gardens, a world-renowned pocket of horticultural history. Founded in 1959 as one of the region’s first nurseries, it became a model for display gardens everywhere.

“At one time, this was the mecca for old landscapers,” said Dick Miner, a retired microbiologist at UC San Francisco who leads Western Hills’ composting regimen as a volunteer. “It’s such a special place.”

The property is known in part for its hundreds of exotic plant species, densely packed and artfully arranged into a thriving botanical cornucopia.

“Some of the most

The sign on the black iron gate says, “These plants can kill”, and it’s emblazoned with a skull and crossbones for good measure. The warning isn’t a joke – the plot sealed off behind these black iron bars is the deadliest garden in the world. And it’s open to the public.

Established in 2005, the Poison Garden at the Alnwick Garden in Northumberland, England, is home to more than 100 toxic, intoxicating and narcotic plants. “Before visitors are allowed to enter, they must have a safety briefing,” said Dean Smith, a guide at the Poison Garden. Visitors are instructed that they’re not allowed to touch, taste or smell anything – nevertheless, as the website notesguests have still occasionally fainted from inhaling toxic fumes as they walk through.

One of the dangerous plants cultivated here is monkshood, or wolf’s bane, which contains aconitine, a neurotoxin and cardio toxin. But that’s