Pragmatic Bollards

Fertilising what?

2012-01-07T19:36:00.000Z

Grime on Lisbon stone - arguably including sulphur dioxide deposits

On Thursday I came across a fascinating article in Science Daily (see link below) about the possibility that the use of potassium fertilisers in flower-beds on top of a Belgrade fortress had contributed to a dark crust on the limestone of the structure itself. Previously this effect has been thought to be more to do with the effects of sulphur dioxide pollution from coal-based industry and heating activities. It is also an effect that occurs widely in the UK and the rest of the world and this research gives much-needed pause for thought on the very use of high levels of fertiliser in horticulture and also in agriculture. It ties in with other effects on biodiversity and landscape that I have noticed in myriad locations.

This blog post is more complicated than some, so instead of weaving the point through the text as I often do, this time I am being very up-front about what it is about:
Economics – why use more than is absolutely necessary, surely having it leach away is throwing money literally down the drain?
Aesthetics – why make what we want to look good look anything but?
Practical common sense – why use too much and at the wrong time for it to benefit the intended recipient?

Guano buildup in Chile is a key source of fertiliser

What is fertiliser? Traditional farming methods have used all manner of extra nutrients to augment the soil in order to improve crop yield and give a better return on investment, of both time and money. Horticulture is similarly interested in promoting growth and vibrant foliage with the aim of making plants grow for longer, flower for longer and, with some but not all, to help them live for longer. Manure, potash, lime dug from lime pits, all have been used widely but have been finite in their availability. In recent decades far greater emphasis has been laid on the use of inorganic fertilisers, many of which are heavy with nitrogen and create ammonia as a by-product. These inorganic fertilisers are ready to be taken up by the plants immediately, which means very speedy results, but the risks of leaching loss are magnified as a result.

In Belgrade high levels of potassium have been found in the soil under the flower beds above the fortress described in the article. This ties in with the results of the analysis of the dark crusts and raises many questions for monuments and stonework in polluted areas across the world. It is particularly an issue for parks managers that such high levels of fertiliser are managing to leach into the soil before being taken up by the plants for which they are intended. The rapid throughput means that valuable resources are not being used efficiently, which has a direct relationship to the costs.

This effect is also similar to a strange obsession with some grassland specifications, particularly roadside verges. There are appropriate places for ‘improved’ ie highly fertilised grassland. Roadside verges in countryside areas are seldom the correct place. The ideal roadside grass is poorly nourished and this will allow wild meadow flowers to become established and give a very healthy look to the grass, which would need cutting a couple of times a year to inhibit the growth of scrub. Many road scheme specifications are heavy on the nutrient-rich topsoil, apparently because ‘that is what you do’. As a consequence nitrogen loving plants such as dock get established and nitrogen fixers such as clover. They outcompete the more delicate plants and the verge rapidly turns into a ragged and unhappy-looking area. Insects are not benefited, drivers are not benefited, pedestrians are not benefited. Maintenance costs ought to be higher to battle the inappropriate growth – but often are not, and it all gets sadly astray from the idyllic intentions of the designer.

Irish field with ivy-clad church

The effects on the landscape of the use of more fertiliser than is needed by the plants for which it was intended are often visible in woodland and scrub areas abutting the improved pasture grassland in livestock farming. A previous blog post (Flatulence and Biodiversity) was on the subject of the value to the digestive system of livestock through a varied diet. This post is dealing with effects that can strangle the ecosystem. The photograph shows a typical field in Ireland. It could be anywhere that has intensive dairy farming, the effects are very similar. The ivy-clad lump in the middle of the field is a ruined church, with no obvious surrounding graveyard. The hedgerow is also ivy-clad. All over the countryside entire telegraph poles are also festooned in layer upon layer of ivy, they look like tree pillars. For the ivy to be as viable as it is, with little other vegetation having any chance to survive, something is obviously very much awry.

In studies in Norfolk and in Devon, ammonia from agricultural sources has been shown to have a detrimental effect upon the development and diversity of lichen species, in particular on twigs which are new growth and have no bark history to complicate the picture. This effect is in addition to the fact that lichens will not grow on the surfaces darkened by dense ivy growth in any case.

All manner of fluids can end up in ground water

It is far from a good idea for extraneous fertilisers to leach into the soil and this is not just for economic reasons. Much leachate ends up within the water supply either sooner or later and many of the effects of nitrate poisoning have yet to be realised. It is connected with a condition known as ‘blue-baby syndrome’ already and there will be other health effects associated. It makes sense to use only what is taken up by the plants, or, preferably just less than is taken up by the plants. In some agricultural areas, healthy soils are a thing of the past, as the reliance upon chemical alternatives has meant some intensive practices not allowing a traditional fallow period for soil chemistry to re-balance. This soil health is complex and sensitive as a subject to many, but washing money down the drain, quite literally, cannot make sense.

In desert areas, where water is at a premiuim, it has been discovered that small quantities of water, in a form of drip-feed, contribute to improved yields. A similar approach for fertiliser is beneficial, and with good levels of organic content as well, the plants could have a chance to get at the nutrients before they sink below their roots....

Wolseley, PA, et al (2006), ‘Detecting changes in epiphytic lichen communities at sites affected by atmospheric ammonia from agricultural sources’ The Lichenologist 38, pp 161-176.

Science Daily article: Heritage Site Under Attack by Flowers

Oh! I didn’t expect that!

2011-12-31T19:37:00.000Z

This is one of my favourite responses to the world I pass through. Much used by many purveyors of advertising, done well it can provoke a huge range of reactions and often-times includes the production of happy endorphins!

This first photograph took only a few short steps out of the back door to achieve the enigmatic ‘You what!’ moment. Apparently a box-load of rubber gloves had been lurking in our neighbour’s shed and she decided one morning to wash them. Obviously the next step was to hang them up to dry. Very practical, but a very strange sight....

The next photo is part of a series that I used in a blog post last year, but it is such a remarkable piece of craftsmanship and warm sense of humour that I have to use another from the set. Kaffe Fassett’s murals for the Highland Stoneware company utilised broken shards from some of their very popular designs. The sheep design just visible adorns a well-loved vase of mine as well as this rock in the bay at Lochinver.

Some sights are utterly normal to those for whom they are a part of their daily life. For the rope-makers in Reykjavik this bobbin delivering stock for the creation of fishing nets and tough mooring ropes are part of the daily routine. For those of us whose grandmothers used smaller bobbins, it is an insight into a world we normally take so much for granted. It also raises questions about the work done behind the scenes, in a way that many other pieces of equipment would be hard-pressed to achieve.

In another way the daily routine for some can challenge our understanding again in ways that we find hard to anticipate until we experience them. In this case the endorphins are less good as the realisation is of poverty and confusion. This building, with its jaunty overtones with the girl walking towards the door, is one of several such properties in Belem in Brazil, on the Amazon delta. Several similar buildings have been renovated, but many are still suffering from the load of vegetation growing out of them. Old Portuguese colonial buildings, there has been little money or care spent on them and the sense in the town of extreme differences of income and prosperity is hard not to see and be affected by.

On a brighter note, last summer we were approached by this wasp as we were out walking (well, leaning on a fence while out walking). As a child I had been brought up to be phobic of wasps and it is only as an adult that I have managed to learn to remain calm, so it is always a slightly nervous moment when one actually flies right towards me. This one was on its own mission, as most of them in fact are, and the fence we were leaning against was absolutely in perfect condition for harvesting, presumably for household nest repairs. As a new ‘tree’ object all that was needed was a check-up on location and I was then ignored totally, even while taking the photographs.

It would be so good to think that 2012 could turn out to be unexpectedly decent and constructive. Wishing you a very Happy New Year.

Not always built to last.....

2011-11-19T17:40:00.001Z

Autumn.
A time of year that triggers reflection, often on the ephemeral nature of things. As deciduous trees respond to the night frosts and the sun sits lower in the sky, leaves turn brown and fall to the ground. This can also be a time to celebrate a spontaneity that can come from short-lived design.

The plan here is to avoid the temptation to get darkly reflective on the short-lived nature of the built form, but to look at items in the landscape that are designed NOT to last, but maybe to give cover to the construction of things that will last or to celebrate an event. Sometimes these designs are for an ephemeral experience, but most often they are in order to add to one that in days past would have been dull-thudding boredom and a trigger for an exotic variety of graffiti. Graffiti comes in many forms and will be the subject of its own post. There is graffiti that is many centuries old, so it is not all eligible for this blog post!

The two photos showing construction boarding were taken in Helsinki and Madrid. In Helsinki the construction perimeter surrounding the new Music Hall was stamped with designs that were echoing the elements of the modern city, such as mobile phones and screaming babies, lawn mowers and bicycles. All sound generators, so a subliminal message of sound went along the distraction from the cranes and steel work on the site. In Madrid airport the construction barriers within the new Terminal 4 had various emblems on them, again with subliminal and up front messages about the future use of the areas behind the screens. The designs interact with the highly polished floors to create patterns for the eye and cease to be about just a wall up to block people out of an area, giving something back in exchange.

Some short-lived designs are a result of members of the public making political statements in imaginative ways, garnering debate and interest. This image is of a protest in Iceland where women and children knitted sections of cover for tree limbs. It was outside the Icelandic Museum in Reykjavik.

And some designs are for ephemeral experience that enhances and augments a profound experience. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is designed in such a way that a beam of sunshine will fall on the altar in the morning. Similar beams of light fall within the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but somehow the power of the blue-ish colour of the light in Bethlehem, allied to the layout, make the design work better.

The theme of ephemeral design masking construction was particularly appropriate with the National Gallery’s installation of the Van Gogh Wheatfield that adorned the face of the gallery over this last summer. It is very much to be hoped that further pieces of this nature follow their inspiring lead - see previous post

Traffic wind-up schemes

2011-10-01T16:28:00.000+01:00

Usually when I put these posts together they are to comment on small features we tend to overlook in our day-to-day lives and they are primarily rant-free zones. No blog can be fully rant-free forever, however, their very existence is for individual expression. Today it is a bit of a rant, but I don’t believe that it is a lonely rant....


There is no visibility to oncoming cars and streams of vehicles head off regardless of priority

We in the UK have an expanding population alongside increased vehicle ownership. More people mean more houses and this means roads that had developed for lower levels of traffic now bear the strain. While attempts to force people to adopt laughably inappropriate and inadequate public transport options fail in rural areas, parallel attempts at slowing the traffic down have varying levels of success.

In our Sussex village, inside the new South Downs National Park, we have what has to be one of the most ridiculous and irritating sets of traffic calming measures ever implemented.

There is a clue in the phrase 'Traffic Calming' that ought to imply that the idea is to calm the traffic down. It is hard to remember this through most measures experienced. Traffic Wind-up is by far the more appropriate phrase. There has been considerable research done on this subject in both the Netherlands and in Germany. It is of no great surprise to learn that traffic behaviour is at its very best when drivers are calm, unstressed and not confused.

In our village drivers are never calm, rarely unstressed and usually confused. A further complication does come in the shape of SatNavs pointing heavy lorries up a High Street that has a weight restriction on it, but the problems are very real even without that.

No professional landscape architect was asked to advise on the scheme. I asked this question in the early days as I spluttered about what had been implemented. There are three 'pinch-points' placed where there is no line of vision to the oncoming traffic and cars are usually parked densely down one side of the road all the way along. Consequently there is often nowhere for the traffic to pass when it meets the vehicles previously unseen. The priority is for traffic leaving the village, but almost all of the time the signs indicating this are missing because someone has knocked them over. Occasionally there are wooden bollards, until they get destroyed.

Inappropriate pavement treatment pushes north-bound
vehicles into the path of south-bound traffic

In the High Street is a pavement layout that further beggars belief. In order to contain car parking bays the pavement suddenly pushes out into the road, so that cars pulling in behind parked cars are pushed into the path of the oncoming traffic! Only to have fists shaken at them as the other drivers presume that they are being pushy...

On occasions we have been waiting behind other cars in a queue to get through the pinch points, only to find ourselves being overtaken and accused of being parked!

On a road heading east, speed bumps have been used as an alternative measure. The early incarnation of these were bolt-down forms put in the wrong way round and regularly took the exhausts off sports cars... It has been a huge benefit to that road to have the traffic slowed down, but there is a Primary School with its own drive that white vans use regularly to drive rapidly round, in order to by-pass the speed humps, singularly defeating the purpose of the slowed traffic and endangering any children unprotected by the mummy-mafia.

I am just old enough to have been taught to drive by assessing the 'speed of the road'. This is using the width of the road and the distance between lamp-posts as a subliminal guide to sensible speed of travel. It is very interesting to note that in the European research the answers have been very similar. To slow drivers down effectively it is best that they are calm and that the road guides them to their speed, subliminally.

In Petersfield road treatment calms drivers

In Petersfield in Hampshire there is a highly effective scheme that uses surface texture and carriageway width to slow the traffic down. It is a pleasure to drive through as a result.

In Petersfield, the width of the road is managed to keep
drivers alert to avoiding oncoming vehicles

In Ditchling people turn into Olympic athletes of world class. The dedication to the task is paramount. The task is getting through, regardless of any commonsense understanding of whether by getting through the first block it will be easier or more difficult to get through the second. Utter dedication, head down and bull-like charge. Nothing is calm, it is life or death. It cannot be the answer, the insurance companies have to pay out too much in car repairs as it is.

There is a great deal more that I would like to say about the horrors of large lorries blocking the road through the stupidity of Satellite Navigation systems ignoring weight restrictions on the routes they select for road access to rural areas, but that would become a very major rant indeed. No emergency vehicles can access the village when these regular, many times DAILY, events take place and it does not help relations with the local industrial estate.

Code: UDPJKNMYWVME

Land of Harps and Puffin'

2011-09-24T17:14:00.001+01:00

Harpa – the new Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland

In August, for various reasons, I found myself in Reykjavik, dropped down by a bus right outside the unexpected sight of ‘Harpa’, the soon-to-be-opened new Concert Hall for Iceland. It was in the last few stages of construction, to get ready for its official opening a few days later. As a result of all that has happened to Iceland over the past few years it looms out of the edge of the harbour all dressed up for a party, surrounded by blank ground where new buildings are apparently intended to turn up sometime soon.

The unfinished landscape treatment added to this strange aura, but all sense of perplexity vanishes in a flash of blue and green-gold light as you look up to the facade as you get closer to it.

The building itself was designed as a collaboration between the Danish Henning Larsen Architects and the Icelandic Batteríið Architects. The dressing up of the facades was planned and designed by a Danish-Icelandic artist called Ólafur Elíasson, apparently to echo the variety of geological and landscape features in Icelandic terrain. (The Harpa website is here). Certainly the effect is mesmerising, and for anyone interested in photography and light it is a playground. The name Harpa I gather is a result of public consultation, Harpa being both Icelandic for harp and a popular girl’s name.

It is a very modern building and the elements are interesting. The facades are constructed in a cellular form with inner and outer sheets of glass. There were window cleaners working when we were there and I have a sort of suspicion they will be there more often than not. There really is alot of glass and many corners.

The different angles of the exterior glass mean a play of light and reflections that is intriguing.
This effect continues on the inside of the building, where there are ceilings hung with mirror style tiles and these also reflect the passers by beneath. Light. Windows. Occasionally the window cleaners appeared in them. When the sun is out it can stream through the windows and the different coloured glass creates incredible light scatters across floors and staircases. The building is full of sharp acute angles and these can lead to some very interesting cross reflections between staircases and glass screens.

There are at least four floors above ground, with even more floors below-ground where the conference rooms predominate. The ceilings are high. This is where the puffins in the title come in, really, with apologies for the pun. By the time you get to the top the views are amazing across to the other harbours and into the city. And you are pretty out of breath unless you take one of the many lifts (puffin’)... (Puffins are also very common birds in Iceland, although we only saw a few because it was past the breeding season and they were out to sea looking for food).

We did not go into the concert halls themselves, we were having too much fun in the part of the building with natural light, but a photo can be seen here

Weather 1 – WIND

2011-09-12T12:24:00.000+01:00


Level crossing sign pushed over by 1987 winds

Last month, as Hurricane Irene rushed her way up the east coast of the United States of America, quite a few people put up their two-penneth on the subject of our own 1987 UK Hurricane. There were references to over-reaction because a few tiles got shaken in the breeze, which I found troubling on two counts:
a) it seemed a bit of an attempt to belittle the very powerful forces heading towards areas of the US that were not used to them and the action taken by politicians to minimise the risk to life of their people; and
b) it seemed an attempt to re-write the story of that time.
Now we have inherited another US storm, Katia, this morning. All this has woken up some very strong memories from 1987 and the consequences for the landscape of Sussex and neighbouring counties. Needless to say the damage in the US has been substantial. The damage in Sussex in 1987 was the worst for 200 years and in many places our skylines still bear the scars.

October 16th 1987. That was the date the winds started to pick up, but the worst was felt in the middle of the night on the 17th. Previous days had seen unprecedented rainfalls and heavy damage to agricultural land and housing from highly publicised mud-slides. It may be that it was a great focus on rainfall amounts that blinded weather forecasters across the region to the impending wind speeds. The scale of the problem arose from an unforeseen jet-streak, but some sort of storm had been forecast for days. I had friends who were enthusiastic birdwatchers and they were anticipating some ‘goodies’ to come in for the 17th. ‘Im indoors was with them in Cornwall the morning of the 16th and only decided to come home on a whim. He nearly got caught in a flood in Sussex when the car engine stopped, but managed to get started again and return home about 1-30am. By this time it was obvious ‘something was up’. Suddenly the temperature and humidity had gone up at about 10-30pm. There was heavy condensation on the outside of the windows because of the difference between outside and in. There was a moodiness in the air. After about an hour and a half the wind really got up and the noise was horrific. We lived in a converted barn at the time and the bedroom was in the roofspace. I had work the following day and wasn’t in the mood for trouble. After one really scary blast I was asked what I was going to do. I said “Do?”, “I’ve got to go to work in the morning, I am not going to DO anything!”, “I refuse to panic until the roof blows off, THEN I’ll panic!”.... After hours of noises horribly like those in Key Largo, one of my favourite films, peace came just before dawn. We overslept because the alarm didn’t go off because of course we had a powercut... Then I panicked!

The scene of devastation that greeted me as I went out of the door was hard to believe. It became rapidly apparent that work was not on the list of the day’s activities. There were trees down everywhere. Dazed neighbours were wandering around and investigating the results of the night. It was hard to believe but many people had slept right through it all, but there were some who had some really terrifying stories. There was a general consensus that we had been exceptionally lucky that it had happened at night, as stories of people killed or injured trying to protect their property came streaming in.

Then we started to hear the real detail of the local stories and to realise how close we had in fact been to the roof blowing off. About twenty yards to the south of us an old and very large barn had been given a new roof only that summer. One of the crashes in the night must have been the noise it made flying off the barn OVER the hedge and into the empty field next door. An elderly couple had been so scared by the noise that they had gone down to their kitchen at about 4am to make a cup of tea. Just as they got into the kitchen their chimney stack fell off, through the roof and landed right onto where they had been sleeping. It took months for the repairs to be done.

There were lighter stories as well. One lad in the village worked at a job he loved in Eastbourne and he was so determined to get to work that he took a chainsaw with him in the car and literally hacked his way through! Friends of ours let their cat out at about 4am and said they realised things were bit windy when they saw him fly past the window. Fluffed up but otherwise unharmed, he was a bit wary of the outdoors for a few days after that.

We were without power for 4 days and had no alternative form of cooking and access to Brighton or to Eastbourne was constrained by the petrol stations also being out of power so not able to let anyone have fuel. We took our evening meals in a local pub who had a stove and were making soup for everyone who called in.

The landscape had been decimated. The leaves from the trees had been stripped off and turned to sap that coated all windows. Many large trees fell like elephants deprived of their tusks. Entire woodlands were flattened, but in a bizarre pencils dropped out of pencil case way. The whole countryside was full of upturned roots and tree plates. It was like the aftermath of a major battle, but more battles were to be fought and in some ways are still being fought, as the clear-up started and analysis kicked in.

In Brighton, Stanmer Park was scoured as the fallen trees and all of their associated topsoil were removed to ‘tidy everything up’. This was not the only area where the response was arguably as destructive as the winds had been, but it was the area I witnessed suffer the most. Massive bonfires destroyed the chance of ecological renewal. On Toy’s Hill in Kent large areas of fallen beech were cleared, to be replaced by a massive tree planting campaign a year later. Acres of green tubes went up to protect the new trees, almost all of whom failed, shaded out by the fanatical regrowth of birch and bracken in the decimated woodland areas. The tubes also advertised a quick meal to the local deer population, who duly chomped off the surviving viable trees.

Seminars were held on HOW the trees had suffered as much as they had. Witness statements were taken from those who had had the courage to look out of their windows on the night of the storm. Again and again recollections of individual trees rotating out of synch with their neighbours were recorded. The trees appeared to have failed and fallen when their roots could cope no longer with the strain put onto them by the forces of the wind. Some of the damage can be attributed to the saturation of the soil from the heavy rainfall for days preceding the storm, and because of the leaves still present in the canopy, making the trees more resistant to the force of the wind.


Regrowth around lime tree pollarded by 1987 storm, Buxted Park

In parkland areas whole swathes of veteran trees were felled. This was particularly the case where the trees had outgrown their position, as with some of the very large conifers at Nyman’s Gardens. Where the veterans were isolated oaks, the scale of the devastation was far less. Buxted Park lost many trees and the ancient lime avenue suffered terrible damage. Firle Park lost many of the remaining elm trees that had just about lived on from the Dutch Elm disease decimation. Many dignified and decent trees lost limbs and crowns. At Fontwell the pockets of woodland behind the walls disappeared in a mess of tangled fallen trunks and branches. Many wooded skylines in the south east are still marked today by the uneven line that tells the story of trees lost and damage felt.


Phoenix growth out of fallen lime limbs, lime avenue Buxted Park

I had the emotional task of measuring all of the magnificent lime trees in the Buxted lime avenue. Fallen or still standing, all were measured. An avenue reputed to date from a planting in 1630 to mark the birth of the future King Charles II, a good 50 years before lime avenues were to become popular and almost certainly planted with a very distinctive stock of hybrid lime from the Netherlands, it was an incredible experience to be measuring the girth of some very gnarled and ancient trees. It was with enormous relief that these trees have not suffered the ignominy of those fallen in Stanmer Park. Significant in the designation of the Buxted Park Site of Special Scientific Interest, the ecological value of these trees for their insect species and their dignity meant that they were left as they were when they fell. Now they are akin to a monument to the other fallen trees of that night. They had been tall and magnificent trees and many fell. Several lost their tops and remain as hollow pollards, but a huge number have developed the most amazing phoenix growth along the fallen trunks. Some of these lie across the path of the old avenue, but many lie along the line and are creating a very distinctive line of trees in themselves.

It is now 24 years since that night. It has become apparent that some of the large trees that appeared to survive those winds may well have suffered a great deal more than was understood until very recently. As with the young trees rolling round and round until their roots gave out, it looks likely that many old ash trees also suffered a level of internal shattering even though they still stood. This has become apparent in recent years, following repeat woodland surveys.

In 1987 the UK was not used to having hurricane force windspeeds and on that night of the 16th/17th October 1987 several of the wind gauges in our region were reported to have broken at their maximum speed measurement, which did lead to some serious under-reporting of maximum gust strength. In some areas, yes the speeds were not greater than a typical autumn storm. In Sussex they certainly were well above that level. As the photograph at the top of this blog shows, they were strong enough to knock sign posts onto a slant.

Tweet Tweet TWITTER

2011-07-27T23:50:00.000+01:00

Tweeting in birds is to attract attention - and food....

It is hard to believe but only a month ago I started to embark upon the roller-coaster ride of learning Twitter, how it works and how people play the game. It has been an incredibly momentous period, with huge world events occurring in tandem, my learning curve including different aspects of how this phenomenon works and otherwise feeding an obsession to follow the Hackgate soap opera. The appalling events in Norway unfolded before my disbelieving eyes once I had spotted the first notice of trouble on the Reuters website, right down to a first tweet on the shootings. To follow that on the same day with the news of losing a very talented musician who had suffered so much pain and be prompted by myriad users to a very fine piece of writing that was strong, compassionate and understood terribly well how these things happen was truly unexpected. I am purposely not naming names here, those names are not why I am writing this blog.

Twitter is so young. It was born in 2006 and took a few days of hatching before it was given such a profoundly apt name, apparently intended as much as anything else to reflect the success of Flickr (I must be one of the very few who are concerned about Flickr but that is different stuff). A collaborative effort following on from brainstorming, with development and input from users and non-users, software developers etc, it has grown into a global presence, sometimes being given credit for more influence than is quite true. Having done a lot of tour-leading and group escorting I know a lot about group dynamics, the nature of the group is frequently at odds with the individuals that make it up, a disconcerting truth that impacts on behaviour patterns. This appears to be something that happens with Twitter as well and is plausibly part of its addictive power.

As with birdsong, individual tweets are completely ephemeral. What has been fascinating, however, is that even taking this into consideration the collective force of tweets is instructive. I have also taken to studying our local bird population with a very different eye, because there are parallels. I think!

It can feel lonely at times

When I opened my account I felt like a young robin sitting on a spade handle making noises that came out rather more harshly than intended, almost staccato. In fact I am still very much in training, so it is a bit hasty of me to be doing this now, but when I can sing fluidly (hopefully) I may forget the learning process and miss this chance to capture the impressions and thoughts of both tweeting worlds. Plus the plan is that when that happens I will be very busy thinking along more focussed lines.

The other day over an outdoor lunch there was a sudden flurry of tweets and twitters in the trees behind us. It was very loud and very insistent and obviously deeply concerned about something that was happening. In web Twitter world this is the equivalent of TT’s or Twitter Trends and they get listed. Once you know they are there they can be the little warning lights that something is ‘up’. With the birds this time it was the very dangerous sight of a hobby (a hawk with a taste for small birds) flying overhead, close enough to be looking for his own lunch. On Twitter, it has been about parliamentary committees, big resignations or mass-shootings allied to bombing. It can also be about rather silly gossip, TV watched or celebrity funny stunts, but these gust up and go again. These TT’s are a bit like when a cat wanders through a hedge, the birds nearby flare-up and then calm down as the feline prowler moves off. Luckily for our birds, the local cats are very focussed on the good supply of rabbit nearby and less inclined to suffer the pecks and parries of outraged beaks.

There are cuckoos. Outside and on the web. People pretend to be who they aren’t for myriad reasons, some users go through a strange authentication process that adult birds really ought to put their over-sized eggs through! One real cuckoo that was round here a few years ago had a strange stutter to its call which was interesting, almost a French accent…. As well as the cuckoos there are the nightingales, who sing long and clearly, lyrical and majestic in their use of phrasing. Our real nightingales even managed to raise chicks this year, so some slightly odd-looking baby robins have been learning to make noises nearby. That is just an amazing sight and an amazing thought.

Some tweeters make more sense than others

There are also some very mad blackbirds. There is one who prostrates himself on any sunny surface, panting in what looks like ecstasy, wings outstretched. Either he or one of his relatives had a habit in the springtime of starting his call at 3am with a VERY limited repertoire! He was very lucky it was dark, slippers at dawn were very imminent. I don’t really need to follow this analogy through, the standard view of Twitter is the level of less meaningful content, but my experiences are not proving that to be the case.

Peer-group pressure can influence behaviour

There is still a great deal to be learned about how this game works. One thing I have learned so far is that there are some peer-group ‘rules’ that need selective obedience unless you want to go quite mad. There is a great deal that cannot be said with reference to the garden, but as Miss Marple was keen to point out, the world happens in a village in microcosm and I believe the same can be true for any collection of living beings.

Van Gogh growing outside National Gallery….

2011-07-11T16:09:00.000+01:00

Close-up of the area of the cypress tree and the sky

Trafalgar Square in London is an alluring place to go to watch people, to watch pigeons and to look at new outdoor art. At the moment there is a fascinating development of art and gardening combined, propped up on scaffolding outside the front of the National Gallery. Buskers are edging their way towards it as they see the responses that it harvests from the members of the public at that corner of the ‘square’. Tourists and locals nestle into the foliage to have their photographs taken ‘as though lying down’ and it is all great fun.


People photographed 'lying in it'

This work is a collaboration of many people, from designers through to clients. I have no way of knowing yet if I have the right idea as to who has been involved, the Landscape Institute announced the involvement of member Shelley Mosco of Green Graphite Ltd, Horticulture Week gave the names of ANS Group and Aldingbourne Nursery, while the whole thing is credited to GE (General Electric) by the National Gallery. However large the team involved really is, the results are fascinating.

On scaffolding next to the entrance to the National Gallery

The painting the plant collage is celebrating is A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, painted by van Gogh in 1889 while he was staying in the St Remy mental home, near Arles. Not surprisingly it is a painting owned by the National Gallery, who were doing a very good trade in fridge magnets inside the gallery the day I went. It is a straightforward painting to use for ‘block’ planting, the blocking of the colours is highly conducive to it and the variations within the paint allow for variations within and between the different plants. At the moment the distinctions between the different colouration of the plants can be a bit more subtle than was probably intended, but this could be a result of the overly wet weather postponing more mature foliage. The choice of ivy for the cypresses should ensure that they retain their dark hue, and if the surrounding planting can lighten up a bit then the effect will be greatly enhance and this ought to happen as the summer progresses. It will be very interesting to see what does happen.

Not all is what we think it is….

2011-06-18T12:55:00.001+01:00

Rubus fruticosus in flower

Most of us tend to look upon bramble growth with irritation and dismiss the plant as common and painful, apart from when it bears fruit.

After my previous post I made a bit of an error of judgement and promised my Facebook friends that the next one would be on brambles. It seemed a good idea at the time, but it has taken me a long time to get not very far with it….

Rubus fruticosus leaves

….because brambles are very common and not very photogenic when they aren’t in flower. Also because the whole topic is enormous and complicated and incredible!

At the moment the season progresses and our shed is hidden from view by a thick tangle of fast-growing thorns. Every year it is the same. I gave up getting to the roots when I realised that the little bits I left were enough to grow later. Spring brings out machete-like hacking.

Rubus ulmifolius - an EASIER difference to spot than most!
(photo Simon Davey)

However to some the bramble is a joy to behold and the focus of intense study. People who get this enthusiastic are known as Batologists (after berries not flying mammals…). In the United Kingdom alone, according to the National Museum of Wales there are c325 named species of bramble Rubus (the genus containing brambles), with maybe 200 more yet to be named! Just think of that when next you pick fruit for bramble and apple pie.

Rubus deliciosus -
an American wild raspberry

Rubus as a genus includes raspberries and many other fruiting plants such as cloudberry. There are others that have bitter or worse berries but largely the fruits are a significant feature in the genus. Ornamental blackberries have been bred to reduce or eliminate the thorns. Some have been bred to have shorter growth and sharper thorns and are used in hedge planting to maintain structure and reduce livestock and human attempts to break through. The variations within the ‘common’ bramble that we think we know so well are subtle and often hard to tell without access to herbarium specimens for comparison of features such as size and floppiness of flower; colour of flower; size and shape of leaves; length of branching; size and lusciousness of fruit; fluffiness of the under-side of the leaf; or position of fruit on the stem. It just goes to show we don’t always know what we think we do about what we see in front of our eyes.

Bramble and apple crumble was a staple pudding in childhood days. I remember many brambling days when SOME of the berries made it back home, tell-tale purple blobs on chins and shirt-fronts explaining very clearly why the haul wasn’t as big as it might have been. As a child I was torn over which was the favourite season, spring or autumn and plumped for autumn because of all the fruit! Now I prefer spring because it has optimism and new growth. And flowers, even on bramble branches….

Now you see it now you don't....

2011-04-03T16:14:00.000+01:00

The Modernist notion of ‘Form Follows Function’ from the turn of the 19th century, but much vaunted in the 1950s and 1960s, was taken to extremes and allowed for a block concrete world where detail and creativity were considered extravagant ‘extras’. I am a very big fan of simple design, and new creative thinking can take detail to a further level than the fundamental starkness popular in the times of fifty years ago. Often we take the results utterly for granted, but on the occasions when we do take notice the effect can be deeply exhilarating. Thinking ‘outside the box’ occurs across the world and using materials of different price and robustness.

Cleveden retracting bollard - photo taken by Joanne Lloyd

Since this blog is about bollards, I will start with a form of bollard that I have loved ever since first meeting one in Brighton just outside the Fire Station. Walking down the street, suddenly this large and solid blob in the pavement started to disappear into the ground! I stood rooted to the spot wondering what was going on, until I realised that standing there had a pretty low life-expectancy if I stayed put any longer. I stepped back as the doors opened and the red engines roared out into the street and off in loud pursuit of the call-out. Often times we will see bollards that collapse on a hinge. These are low-tech and require little maintenance, but woe the tyre that gets near to them. The electric retraction bollard is a piece of beauty and smooth operation. The photograph was taken by my friend Joanne Lloyd of bollards at a Marina just outside Bristol. This bollard automatically retracts when approached from one side but not the other. The Fire Station bollard has to have been activated remotely, since no vehicle was in sight at the time it disappeared....

Drainage in patterned paving, Lisbon

Drains. Without drains in our wet climate we would always be paddling or slipping on ice covered pools. In dry climates the rains can come heavily and often the drains need to be larger to accommodate the high if less frequent level of runoff. Drains in public open space come in all manner of shapes and sizes and there can be various techniques employed to manage how intrusive they can be. I love the simplicity of form of the drain in a square in central Lisbon, where the texture of the small unit paving and the holes in the drain echo one another and the alignment of the drain is utterly true to the design of the paving. Never easy to achieve, but very effective

Pedestrian crossing, Helsinki

when done well. In a similar vein pedestrian crossings don’t always have to be done in paint, they can also be incorporated within the design. Problems arise if roadworks take place underneath the spot, tarmac infill can cause a moth-eaten effect…..

Cycle path, Stockholm

We have a world that is dominated by signage and so much so that most of us have developed a disturbing knack of missing some completely because we have gone into overload. Advertisers are now trying to hit us with varying levels of “You what!” advertising, a form I have always called frictional because it creates an effective that draws attention in spite of ourselves. Landscape designers are now using new creative techniques to enclose the signage users want to know about in the detail of their schemes. Two special forms are shown here, an embossed metal outline of a bicycle showing which is the cycle lane on a complex of paths from Stockholm, Sweden and a surprising little disabled sign


Disabled sign, Montecristi, Ecuador

from Montecristi in Ecuador made from blue marble sitting in concrete. Simple and effective methods of realigning our response to the clutter of signs.

Hanging basket, Tortola Botanic Gardens

My final comment relates to a special piece of low-tech design I saw in Tortola Botanic Gardens. The ingenious use of common materials is a major feature in the Caribbean landscape and tyres crop up as planting pots for date palms, boundary fencing and also as this very attractive hanging basket. The same day that we saw this we were treated to a steel band whose extra piece of percussion came from brake discs!

Function and design are inter-twined concepts, but this doesn’t actually imply any rules to be adhered to at all. So long as they work, of course.

LIGHT CHEER

2011-02-28T16:21:00.000Z

Traditional lights on the South Bank in London with smoky glass blocking light upwards without spoiling the effect of the light

Candle-light in a summer garden

February is often a hard month to cope with and it is a joy to behold March, for although Spring is welling up and young snowdrops and early daffodils can make their appearance and refresh the spirit, much of the change is in terms of ‘promise’. Buds fill and the surface of twigs and the ground change into velvet softness after the harshness of winter days and nights. Personally I have always found my patience starts to run dry in February, and even if there has been the chance to travel to exotic climes, the very dankness of the dark days and dampness can be dispiriting. I have also noticed that other people have a less tolerant mind in February and can get quite ‘snappish’.

Looking on the ‘bright’ side now….

Lit paving in London

On dank and dark dingy days the presence of light can be electrifying to a darkened soul. Many more landscape schemes have been incorporating light in small spaces as technology gets more playful. Lighting doesn’t just have to be for Christmas, our local garden centre now maintains tree lights for 12 months of the year which is cheering in the summer and instructive in the winter on darker afternoons because you know where the gate is…

Landscape lighting can be very cheering.

There is also a point where landscape light can cause problems, particularly if the wrong kind of lighting is selected. Modern lighting is thankfully very often designed to light the places where the light is desired and to avoid the places where a sense of darkness at night to aid restful sleep or encourage astronomy is key. There is still a long way to go, but there has been a remarkable improvement in creative thought in the past few years. Blocking or inhibiting light up to the sky unless where building frontages are to be lit can be achieved in simple ways.

Some lighting is for security purposes and aids restful sleep through reduction of worry.

Mural of the Northern Lights on Norwegian building

In the last few weeks Scotland has had the unusual chance to enjoy some of the Aurora borealis – the Northern Lights. One year it was possible to see them in Sussex, when it looked like vast search lights in the sky. In Scandinavia people go skiing in Spitzbergen which doesn’t really get light as we understand it in the winter, in the same way that it doesn’t get dark during the summer. They ski lit by the Northern Lights, which must be an incredible experience. One comment I heard about the Scottish experience was a bit of reverse poetry. Apparently what this person was able to see and experience was lights chasing into the sky of a subtle form in mixtures of pink and orange – “a bit like looking across the lights of London, I suppose”….. This was a view across the Highlands in a section where very few people live and any lights are usually twinkling headlights from cars.

Capturing sunset in New Mexico

Some lights have cheer added to THEM

Rabbiting Year

2011-01-17T23:00:00.001Z

On the third of February this year we enter the new Chinese Year of the Rabbit (according to Wikipedia). This is supposed to be a more diplomatic and less turbulent year than the previous one, the Chinese Year of the Tiger. Speaking personally, that seems a jolly good idea! While I keep an open mind on all manner of notions, the mantra of things looking up is one I intend to embrace.

Rabbits are also a great deal more relevant to landscape architecture than tigers, so there is a lot more to be said. For a start there are a great deal more of them, something they continue to achieve with enthusiasm (although the European Rabbit is now a threatened species in its own natural habitat in Spain and Portugal – see Wikipedia and IUCN red list). Secondly they occur in many different places and often in close proximity to rural people in their working lives or in gardens.

Rabbits are voracious eaters. When we first moved into our current home we witnessed the decimation of a much-loved pot plant on its first night in its new location with horror. The following weekend we went shopping for some plants for the garden and bought three rose bushes and a magnolia, thinking the roses would be too thorny and the magnolia too sour a taste for them. Ha ha! It turns out that young thorny shoots are a favourite and they loved the magnolia equally. Thankfully although they all suffered, we were able to put fencing around them in time and now they flourish. We went back to the garden centre, who gave us a list of plants rabbits won’t eat. Ominously roses were on it. We showed it to the neighbours who chuckled and said that they knew of examples of most of the plants on the list that had been decimated over the years. Someone forgot to give the list to the rabbits!

Rabbit proofing

As the years have passed our rabbit population has declined alongside the growth of some very large domestic cats in the neighbourhood. Some of these cats are now so large the bird population is safe, because those dainty treats aren’t a patch on the taste of real rabbit. It feels a bit wrong to watch this change with a lack of pity, rabbits are one of the traditional cuddly furry animals alongside bears and guinea pigs. A landscape training distances you from the rabbit for exactly the same reasons as we suffered in our garden. A well-designed bit of open planting has to be installed with rabbit-proof fencing as part of the specification until the thorny species have hardened up and usually for five years at the minimum. Rabbits like to strip the bark off trees and so rabbit guards are also a feature. The youngsters are quite experimental which can be highly destructive. In open landscapes the presence of rabbit or deer populations is shown by a ‘skirt’ line to tree canopies that are near to the ground. Holly bushes can also have this skirting effect, which is surprising until you look at and feel the young leaves before they harden and realise that they could be eaten and digested fairly easily.

Several years ago I worked on a historic park in Sussex which had a string of terraced lawns progressing from the balcony outside the house into the ‘pleasure grounds’ and the outer parkland. These lawns were not balustraded as with many Sussex properties, they relied on steep banks between the lawns for a softer effect. As a result of the softer effect, at the time we were working there many rabbits had turned the whole string into an unmanaged warren! The extra complication was that the owners LIKED the rabbits! It was very hard to persuade them that they were losing their lawns and that there were other areas the rabbits could live that were less destructive and less threatening to their chances of getting grants for landscape restoration proposals….. there are plenty of places where their eating habits mean benefits to keeping unwanted vegetation down - so long as where they live is more robust.

So here’s hoping for a more amiable year with the right things happening in the right places!

Ivy – Helix in more than name

2010-12-10T09:44:00.000Z

Hoar frost ivy in Sussex

When I decided to put something together on a Christmas plant I chose ivy largely because I was intrigued by what I might discover, only to discover that it has had little more than cursory mentions amid hinted at deeper stories. Ivy as a Christmas decoration is often twinned with holly, but much folklore prefers it used for outdoor rather than indoor decorations because it has some awkward pagan overtones. Ivy is also a symbol of Bacchus and its use in garlands and head decorations was popular because it was believed to ward off the ill effects of too much alcohol. This is very appropriate for modern Christmas Days when many people across the country start the day with a Buck’s Fizz and continue drinking until the end of the Christmas meal. In the early Christian church it was not so highly thought-of and it would be interesting to know what store the temperance movement might set by its continued use as a Christmas emblem.

Telegraph pole, Ireland

Ivy was named Hedera helix by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum of 1752. Helix as a word dates back at least to the 1560s and almost certainly well before, referring to ‘spiral’ in both the Latin and the Greek. In modern parlance, of course, we think of the helix of life, of the description of DNA and its double helix form. A close look at the form of ivy as it climbs a tree shows a spiralling growth and multiple stems intertwining as they progress up the tree. In a similar species, the strangler-fig in the rainforest, this action is far less benign than the picturesque image we have of the ivy. In the rainforest trees are used as support for the young and semi-mature vine, until it reaches a weight and height that can be self-sustaining after which point the host tree is allowed to rot and die away. The weight of the ivy can bring down a less robust tree, but strangulation is not in its primary vocabulary.

Ivy clad wall, Ireland

Ivy as a plant grows well almost anywhere in temperate climates. It is pretty robust in dark, dank and northern aspects as well as being remarkably tolerant of low rainfall and pollution. This has made it consistently popular as a plant in gardens and public spaces for centuries. In Europe in medieval times it was part of the palette of plants, including vines, used to drape over trellises and arbours, providing a manageable structure to the green areas of the time. It is used frequently to cover walls and fences. At periods through history it has been used as a wall covering for houses, where it was considered to be beneficial in the retention of warmth because of the outer area of the plant having the leaves, inner areas having air pockets made by the path and the intertwining of the stems. In the past 80-100 years this view has been challenged by the very realistic concern about how the plant travels as it grows and how intrusive to soft mortar this can be. The old stems are robust and tree-like. The young shoots are climbers and they are explorative, using sucking fronds to ‘stick’ to the surfaces they climb. On an old brick wall with mortar in need of repointing, or with an old sandy mortar, this can lead to young shoots growing into small cavities, fattening as they grow and ultimately breaking up the wall.


Ivy growing on house walls

Earlier this autumn, I was in Inverness at the time of the Housing Expo. It was fascinating to see one of the houses employing a mixed innovative and traditional approach. Scotland, in particular eastern Scotland, can be profoundly affected by strong winds in the winter months. This house uses a recycled rubber covering to protect the walls from the cooling impact of these winds and ivy is being grown up the side of the building to help with this protection. It will be very interesting to hear how this and all of the truly innovative houses on this estate fare. With the rubber coating it will be a while before there will be too many small cavities to be explored.

Aralia hispida in Newfoundland

Finally I am adding a photograph that we used as a Christmas card a few years ago. It is called Bristly Sarsaparilla and grows on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. As a plant it is a distant relative of the American Poison Ivy as well as being a family member of our ivy. Its form is evocative of the berries and flowers of our own native ivy and several friends were kind enough to remark upon it. Its latin name is Aralia hispida and Hedera helix is in the Araliaceae family.

Ball Bearings at Stonehenge

2010-12-02T14:15:00.001Z

Stonehenge from the A303

Many years ago as a young Geography student at Exeter University I pleaded with my tutors to be allowed to do a dissertation on visitor behaviour at Stonehenge. Unfortunately it was not to be, there was no-one who had the necessary knowledge to be able to act as my tutor so I went down a map route studying the archaeological mapping by the Ordnance Survey in Wiltshire instead. My only real regrets are financial, my years in the map world have been wonderful and to have a 'great' as a tutor instead was inspiring. Brian Harley is much missed.

Since then I have had the enormous privilege to have worked on Stonehenge as a landscape architect and graphic designer and enjoyed it immensely. It is a wonderful site still in need of enormous TLC and sensible planning.

Granite balls in the modern landscape

It was with fascination that I read the Science Daily article on a young Exeter student's ideas about the movement of the stones from Wales and evidence that he has spotted as to how this could have been achieved. Now a PhD student he has been working on decorated granite balls at Scottish Neolithic sites, especially in Aberdeenshire, since he was a second-year undergraduate. He noticed that there were similar balls found near to Stonehenge. With his colleagues at Exeter experiments have been undertaken using spheres and gouged logs that do cast interesting light on a possible technique for the long-distance transport of the Preseli stones used for some of the construction of Stonehenge. Anyone who has spilt a bag of frozen peas on the kitchen floor will have a very good idea as to how such small objects can be capable of carrying MUCH heavier objects! What is intriguing is the idea of how, in the absence of frozen peas, Neolithic man could have come up with such an innovative solution. There is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians used logs for much of their transportation of large blocks of stone, but in a culture not as obviously sophisticated the idea of ball-bearings is fascinating. The first UK patent for ball-bearings was not given until 1794!

Granite ball engraved as a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg in Stockholm
contrasts with the bicycle wheel

The ingenious nature of this design is that directional control would have been easier for the large blocks as the balls would have been guided on the grooved, seasoned wood and this would have been easier than the less flexible log-rolling used by the Egyptians and also than anything simple wheels could have achieved under such weights. The journey from Preseli to Wiltshire is far from flat or straight and any techniques used would need to be able to accommodate uneven paths and many sloping landforms. I hope very much that the next few years of work on this do prove that it is correct. The engineering is simple and sublime!

Spheres are a symbol of universal potent power

Covering Rock

2010-10-29T19:58:00.000+01:00

Not all recycling is messy or boring, as I realised with glee on a recent visit to Scotland and the two Highland Stoneware shops in Ullapool and Lochinver. The wall coverings on the building exteriors are a joy to behold and use the broken pottery pieces in a creative and memorable way. Highland Stoneware is beautiful and evokes the character of the highlands in many of its pieces.

The Lochinver boulders with their covering of pot fragments echo the lichen covered boulders higher up in the mountains.

The mural designs were by the remarkable Kaffe Fassett (with his assistant Brendon Mably) and are dated on the murals to 2000 for Ullapool and 2002 for Lochinver. In many places the ability of the broken pottery to use its third dimension is used for clever effect. Several teapot spouts scatter the front of the building, for example.

Much of the pottery they used is recognisable in the complete works for sale inside the studio shops. There are tremendous echoes with the ceramic mosaics designed by Antoni Gaudi in the Parc Guell in Barcelona. The difference with the Highland Stoneware work is that it is in a location where the inspiration is immediately apparent.

Truly pragmatic bollards....

2010-05-30T15:48:00.000+01:00

Here are some bollards being pragmatic!

It looks like quite a sad tale for them. They have been summarily stacked against the lamppost while they are replaced by more robust cast-concrete bollards. Despite having environmentally-friendly credentials through being made of extruded plastic bags, they were not selected or placed for a busy roadway. Cars park regularly on this street and I have seen sufficient damage to a friend's car through attempts to park next to bollards to know that they need to take quite savage hits at times. The dust-line on these bollards shows that they would not have been very good at giving back what they got. With luck they will be moved to a different location, maybe doing people management rather than vehicle.

The photograph was taken in Willemstad, Curacao in January 2010. There is a very good tradition of recycling and reuse of physical objects in the Caribbean, so it is almost certain that the bollards would be put to a new use and not wasted.

Daffydowndilly, Lent Lily, the harbinger of spring

2010-03-28T16:55:00.002+01:00

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal April 1802

The next plant group that I mention has to be the Daffodil. We have suffered such a long and dark, cold and bitter winter and now spring is being kept held at bay. So much so that the Daffodil Festival in Thriplow, over the weekend 20/21 March, was widely publicised by the press having fun at its expense, because very few of the daffodils were in flower as it started. They are blatantly still 'feeling the cold' and keeping themselves for a few more days.

This genus has vast hordes of people writing about it, so I am concentrating wholely on the plants we all consider to be common daffodil, despite that being a somewhat complicated idea. The literature is comprehensive. I will acknowledge 2 major sources for this blog post. Alice M Coats performed a remarkable feat in her works on the history of garden plants. Narcissus appears in Flowers and Their Histories, published in 1956. Penelope Hobhouse is also a major figure in the research on plants in garden history and published Plants in Garden History in 1992. In 2002 a book was published by Taylor & Francis edited by G Hanks; Narcissus and Daffodil: The Genus Narcissus as part of a series on medicinal and aromatic plants. It is on order so I cannot make direct reference to it for this blog post, but there are a couple of comments that I make that have been triggered by its publicity material.

Daffodil or Narcissus? Both names have origins that may be myths. Of course it is more scientific to use Narcissus, but Daffodil has long-standing charm and poetic celebration. They both describe plants that are more diverse in colour and form than those with which the names are immediately associated in popular culture. Both names in fact originate from the white rather than the yellow form of the plant. Narcissus is known to be a Greek word and for many years it was thought this was inevitably linked to the myth of the youth tricked into looking into a still pool and seeing his own beautiful reflection for the first time, falling in love and turning into a (white) flower. The truth is more intriguing, since it comes from Narce according to Pliny in 320BC, which 'betokeneth nummedness or dulnesse of sense', from the intensity of the aroma from the flower. What makes this intriguing is that eastern daffodils have been found to contain quantities of Galanthamine – a narcotic chemical used in the amelioration of dementia and Alzheimer's. Daffodil, or daffydilly as Shakespeare had it, is a corruption of Affodyl, in itself based on Asphodel, another often white plant! The reasons for this connection have yet to be explained.

In the UK, wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) is primarily a woodland plant, behaving in a similar fashion to bluebell but normally flowering earlier in the season. It often flowers on the First of March, which made it an obvious alternative to the leek for St David's Day adornment. The period of its peak flowering during Lent in most years led to another old name being Lent Lily. The wild plant is fairly small with the trumpet cloaked by the outer petals, rather than 'set off' by them as we know in the cultivated form that is so much more abundant. The photograph was taken by Simon Davey.

There have been two phases of intense interest in growing daffodils in this country. The first was between the mid 16th and mid 17th centuries as bulbs were collected from the hills of Europe and cultivation began to throw up new hybrids and varieties. The Iberian peninsula is especially important for the introduction of Narcissus hispanicus, the Great Spanish Daffodil. This magnificent plant is tall and erect with a proud bright yellow head and is one of the key ancestors for the 'common daffodil' we all think we know so well. In 1597 Gerard listed a dozen plus different daffodils in his Herball. Thirty years later Parkinson listed 78.

After this period of activity it all went very quiet and many of Parkinson's list went out of fashion and ceased to be available. This may have been from a combination of factors that included both changes in the design and layout of parks and gardens that took place in this period, as well as the fall in temperatures that accompanied the Little Ice Age. The next period of daffodil-raising began about 1837, leading to the widespread travels of Peter Barr (called the Daffodil King) who was able to refind many of the species lost since Parkinson's time. Since his time the daffodil has gained a substantial place in the hearts of all, with numerous hybrids between yellow and white, multiple stemmed varieties and double-flowered heads that I personally have enormous affection for, but which require copious amounts of water and luck to maintain a stem strong enough to hold the heavy heads. The Royal Horticultural Society have a Daffodil Register and Classified list from 2008 that contains 27,000 different plants identified as of garden origin up to June 2007.

What struck me very forcibly as I was putting this together was the timing of the two periods of intense cultivation compared to the penning of the lines which have made the daffodil so much a part of our cultural heritage. Wordsworth went for his walk with his sister Dorothy exactly in the period in which the daffodil was out of favour. It was to be a further 35 years before the resurgence of interest began. I then re-read the lines written by Dorothy in her Journal and thought their description more suited to the wild daffodil than those whose photograph is often put alongside reproductions or quotes of the poem. Apparently it is widely known among botanists that he was describing wild daffodils, but it came as a surprise to me. In fact there is a bit of concern about the health and future of the very plants he described, in 2002 the National Trust announced that they are worried that some garden variety plants that have appeared nearby may be hybridising with the Ullswater plants and that they are carrying out research to establish the origin of the new plants and come up with what to do next. It is with a wry smile that I think of the Poet's Daffodil (otherwise called the Pheasant's Eye Daffodil) also being the white form, an incredibly beautiful plant that has been grown in cultivation for centuries, easily pre-dating Wordsworth, for whom it was never named, of course.

Daffodils herald the spring for us in such a glorious and flamboyant sunniness, encouraging joy and hope even under dark wet conditions. Snowdrops are an appropriate beginning but we need that yellow for our hearts to lift to meet the rays of the sun.

Appreciating Lichens...

2010-03-15T13:42:00.004Z

...Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
a ruined abbey, chancel only,
lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
romanesque against the sky....
John Betjeman, Ireland with Emily.

A landscape friend of mine has asked me several times to do something about lichens, which I feel a bit shy about doing. I am a landscape architect married to a lichenologist. It isn't often that venturing into subjects that you know many people who know the material better than you do is particularly sensible, so I have resisted her suggestion each time she has made it. However, lichens are a part of all of our worlds and the international lichen community is in the process of selecting their top 100 lichens. This has started me thinking about how I would address that as a landscape architect, and not as a lichenologist. Lichens come in all manner of shapes, sizes and textures. They grow on all manner of surfaces, which now include my car following a couple of years of dusty summer PM10 deposits building up in crevices of windows out of the reach of the car wash. Many of the current great lichenologists have a profound love and in-depth knowledge of tiny little dot lichens that most people wouldn't even notice. Landscape architects are more likely to prefer the more showy lichens.... (In fact the emerging list contains many very beautiful lichen species and I will add a link to the full list when it is available in the next few weeks).

The key surfaces upon which lichens grow are: rocks (saxicolous), trees (corticolous), wood (lignicolous), soil (terricolous), moss (muscicolous), other lichens (lichenicolous) as well as leaves (foliicolous) and even metal (metaliferous). Almost all of these surfaces are ones that we work with in landscape design or management. Graveyards are the most obvious places where people can see lichens growing and which generate a great deal of reaction to their presence. Lyrical poetry has been written on the relationship of lichen covering to the concept of age, and occasionally it is linked to the idea of decay, which is not at all fair. Some churchyards go to extraordinary lengths to 'clean' the churches and memorials of their lichen covering. It is known for new stones to be polished to resist lichen cover, which is a shame and has given many modern graveyards a stark and aggressive character, with each letter etched deeply and embossed in gold leaf.

In cities such as London, until about 30 years ago, most lower plant cover of monuments, walls and trees came in the form of a dark green alga mixed with soot. It was ugly and it felt as though everything needed a good wash. This was due to the very high levels of industrial and coal- based pollution. It is amazing to consider that in some cities now the air pollution levels have sunk below those of the countryside which is awash with nitrates from fertiliser. Work being done on air quality by OPAL is showing very clearly the increase in pollution-sensitive lichens colonising urban centres, with decreases also showing in rural areas as nitrate levels increase (more information here). OPAL is an initiative run jointly by the British Lichen Society, the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, London.

Lichens can give valuable details about the health of an area, urban or rural. There is a lovely simple grey lichen that can tell if a piece of woodland has been under continuous canopy for over 400 years just by its very presence. It is highly sensitive to change in management.

There is a brilliant and flamboyant yellow splat of lichen that announces very graphically where birds or dogs have 'been'. It thrives on nitrates and is also very keen on airborne particles of nitrogen compounds that can build up in the nooks and crannies after a period of dry weather. This can mean that it will grow on small twigs in preference to the main bark of a tree. Almost all lichen names are in Latin only. This lichen is called Xanthoria perietina.

I have had a long affection for and interest in the use of concrete because it is so ubiquitous and flexible in how it can be used. Different surface textures can be designed into it, but it does have a poor reputation based heavily on the green alga that will grow on it as it ages, dulling a once bright surface, making it appear in need of tooth-whitening techniques. I believe that it may be possible for us to design in ways to make this work. In the 1980s there was a short fashion for architects to design their wooden cladding in office atria and the 'reconstructed stone' effect of the buildings' exterior to tie together. Since this poncy name is basically concrete when used in a fine grain form it is very interesting that the inevitable streaking of the surface came to reflect the grain of the wooden panels indoors. Some buildings and walls have had pig slurry or other compounds sprayed onto the walls to encourage rapid colonisation by lichens to mellow their look and imply age and robustness.

I have chosen a few lichens to comment further on:

Cladonia stellaris is an arctic species that doesn't occur anymore in the British Isles. It is eaten by reindeer and moose, and is a major constituent of reindeer moss. The relevance for landscape, apart from the utter beauty of its form, of course, is the history of its use for architectural modelling. It is one of only a few species that were used traditionally in the depiction of trees around buildings. I used to be able to buy bags of it for my college models. It was often dyed varying shades of green, which softened the normal crunchiness of the growing organism.

A lichen that gets both lichenologists and members of the public equally excited is Lobaria pulmonaria. This lichen has been given an English name, Lungwort, in the herbal tradition of health-giving properties showing in the visual form of an organism. It was considered to be a powerful aid in the treatment of lung disease as a result of its very lung-like characteristics. It is incredibly sensitive to air pollution and occurs in the best quantities in western Scotland and Ireland. It does occur in pockets in England and is heavily protected by legislation. In paintings by Constable of trees at Flatford Mill, he shows it as abundant on their trunks. It has not been seen in East Anglia since the industrial revolution.

A sibling to Xanthoria parietina is Xanthoria aureola. This is a coastal species also fond of bird droppings etc, but has a different character and form to its more widespread relative. It is also more likely to be orange rather than yellow.

Many other lichens have siblings with different localities. Ramalina farinacea is a widespread lichen often seen growing on twigs or fences. It prefers a good air quality.

Ramalina siliquosa, on the other hand, although with a similar form, is far more fussy. Not only does it require good air quality, but it really needs that air to be salty and is another lichen with a range that is primarily coastal. Strangely, it does grow on Wiltshire Sarsen stones, a fact that has not been easy for lichenologists to explain.

And finally....

When picnic tables come towards the end of their useful life it is not everyone who shuns them, by any manner of means. As they age, their lichen community increases and so does the community of lichenologists who enjoy them.....

as well as having their own way of showing appreciation of paving...the next photograph was taken by Simon Davey on a field visit to the Netherlands.

For further information – the obvious site from which to begin - The British Lichen Society

What's In a Name?

2010-02-28T18:20:00.000Z

It has become easier and more frequent for individuals to travel in the past 50 years, as air flights have become more affordable and peer-group pressures have increased. I have benefitted from this myself and have always been amazed by the range and wonder of the plants and culture of new places. The experience for us, however, is so different to that of the intrepid plant hunters and travellers of the past. When travelling to the Canary Islands, for example, I was first struck by my surroundings in a surreal sense. In a warm climate with a friable volcanic soil I felt surrounded by pot plants growing outside. It felt a bit like an enormous garden centre! So many of our well-known plants travel almost more than we do and so we can recognise old friends or, more frequently, the genetic cousins of our old friends who have not been bred to show different characteristics to those you find in the wild. For early travellers they must have looked very much more strange.

As a landscape architecture student I chose to base one of my projects at Wakehurst Place, based obliquely on a small project I had been involved with to investigate the possible site for a new visitor centre. The undergraduate project, because it was not a real project, took the enormous conceptual leap of placing a large building on the sensitive site, so it was with some wry amusement that I watched the preparations only a few years later for the building of the Millennium seedbank! I went rather whacky with my concept and got massively tangled up in whirls of time, spirals and the long-standing relationship of Wakehurst with China and plants of Chinese origin. This also began a long-standing interest in the plants that have been used at different periods in the history of landscape and garden design. I also dabbled with drawing in a pseudo-Chinese style. Thankfully the drawing style shifted, but the interest in the history of our use of plants has remained. This means that I intend to run occasional blogs based upon this, focussing on individual species or themes.

My first choice of plant may seem a strange one. It is a far from fashionable species at the moment, sadly some of our neighbours have just removed a fine specimen from their garden within the past 6 months. It is a plant that I have loved since childhood and I believe illustrates many factors that relate to the introduction of any plant, and there is also a special Wakehurst cultivar of it, which is appropriate. It was also found by a Scotsman, possibly the greatest plant collector af all time, which has to be good news! He was also strongly connected to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, a major haunt of my childhood.

The plant I have chosen is what I have always known as Pieris forrestii. It was found by (and named for) a man called George Forrest, from Falkirk. It can grow to considerable size, as is evident in this specimen that grows at RHS Wisley. Forrest found the original plant in Yunnan Province in China and brought it back for his sponsor, AK Bulley, who ran Bees Nursery and whose collection is the basis for the Ness Botanic Garden, now part of the University of Liverpool. It was named Pieris forrestii by RL Harrow in 1914, and then renamed Pieris formosa var. forrestii by Airy Shaw in 1934 after further work had been carried out on the specimen in RBG Edinburgh's herbarium. It was decided that although its growth style was very different, it was still too closely related to Pieris formosa to be split off from it. The plant often used in cultivation is Pieris formosa var. forrestii 'Wakehurst'. This cultivar from the early twentieth-century was bred to increase tolerance of frost and to encourage the bright red spring shoots and other characters that made the original plant so attractive. It became very popular in the middle of the twentieth-century in particular.

China's hillsides remain less well-travelled than many other parts of the world, despite being the source slopes for many thousands of our favourite garden plants, brought home by many of the famous names of plant hunting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Many of the plants brought back bear a passing resemblance to their forebears, but have been altered often to quite a degree, with emphasis on size and abundance of flowers in favour of dignity. Sadly it appears that many rhododendrons and other woody species that share the diverse range of the Pieris family in China and also in the Americas are vulnerable to the new outbreaks of the terrible fungul attacks from Phytophthora ramorum. Inevitably this will reduce further their fashionability, which is a shame because their flamboyance and sense of fun are infectious and inspiring.

An old name for Pieris is Andromeda, which appears to relate to the beauty and form of the flowers they all bear, in mythology Andromeda became a constellation after her death. This name was a Linnaean one, from which Pieris split in 1834 when Don named Pieris formosa from its previous name of Andromeda formosa, given to it by Wallich in 1820. There is only one Andromeda left now, a cute little plant called Bog Rosemary in English. The flower is special, but looks very different to the stellar florets of all Pieris. All other larger members of Andromeda have been split off into Lyconias, Gaultherias and several more species including Pieris.

The original Andromeda formosa was found by Wallich somewhere in Nepal before he named it in 1820. Wallich was originally from Copenhagen and started working for the British East India Company in 1814, where he was heavily involved with the Oriental Museum and the Botanic Gardens in Calcutta. While he was Superintendant of the Botanic Gardens he sent large volumes of plant seed back to England. Despite the description of the plant in 1820 and the renaming of the genus in 1834, records show Pieris formosa as having entered use as a garden plant only in 1856. It really does appear that George Forrest's form with its young red shoots was what was needed to make it a fashionable and popular plant nearly 100 years later.

In my childhood I would watch impatiently for those soft red young shoots to start growing. For me it was the moment when the year took on warmth and promise. I would relish their apparent optimism and try to borrow some of it. Even now, as an adult, I look with joy as the leaves start to form. I do confess that I have always found the flowers a bit of an oddity, but when you look directly at them, their form is compelling and has its own charm. It is interesting to reflect upon the name 'Pieris'. David Don (another Scot) who restructured Andromeda in 1834 is considered to have taken as his inspiration for the name the Pierides, the Greek Muses. It is so tempting to take a lateral shift on this and move across to the idea of the Pierian Spring as in Alexander Pope's “Essay on Criticism”
   "A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
    Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
    There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
    And drinking largely sobers us again.”
and to have the genus as a spring flowering flamboyant intoxication.

http://www.rbge.org.uk/assets/files/about_us/press_releases_04/George_Forrest_feature.pdf
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JARS/v31n1/v31n1-bell1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Wallich

Physical Resonances

2010-02-07T15:49:00.005Z

This post is going to stray a tad from the physical 'concept' of the blog into the arena of theory and economic theory at that. This is intended to be a suggestion for further thought and is not based on anything in particular that I have come across from anyone else. If others have noticed the same connections, I am not at all surprised. I am a landscape architect and not an economist, so the thoughts have yet to be tested.

In the year 2000 London's newest bridge across the Thames was opened and promptly closed 3 days later. It was a footbridge and had been designed through a multiple committee process using what appear to have been primarily wheeled traffic models to calculate the forces of weight and wind that were likely to impact upon it. Of course it was a pedestrian bridge and pedestrians don't behave like cars. Useful as it would be to have our own wheels, we have feet and we have rhythm. According to Wikipedia here the first day of opening also coincided with a charity race that meant up to 2,000 people were on the bridge at any one time for most of the day. While not marching like soldiers, people who walk together often share a walking pace and frequency. The bridge started to respond to the resonance of the people walking. The people walking started to respond to the resonance of the bridge and the inevitable happened. The bridge started to bounce.

Quite a few people have had the amazing privelege to walk on overhead walkways in rainforest or jungle environments. These bridges are notorious for their resonance from single foot passengers. This can be quite marked because there are no damping devices possible on such simple structures. On the Millenium Bridge in London it was possible for the damping devices to be placed at intervals across the bridge and when it opened again 2 years later it was possible for large numbers of people to walk across the bridge with no discernible effects and therefore no bringing on of the rhythm that caused feet to fall together and accelerate the bounces.

In our economy we have economic models constructed in a similar way to that of the bridge. They assume the behaviour of the traffic to be consistent at all times, when we as frustrated bystanders know only too well from our own experiences how incredibly vulnerable stock holding is to the effects of the bounces in the market. Intelligence doesn't always work in the markets, fear is a far greater influence. The effect is of course also exaggerated on occasions by the comments made by others who may not have obvious reasons for saying what they do. Confidence works in a way that does seem to me to be remarkably akin to the accelerated bounces on the Millenium Bridge. It would do no harm if models could be built to look at this effect and to see if the parallels could in fact help build a resolution for such a long running problem. I have worked on historic landscapes where the effects of previous economic fallout have affected the layout of veteran trees. One historic park that I can think of has a strange young series of avenues, where the trees are 150 years younger than the design period they belong to. This turns out to be as the result of a benefactor reinstating a predecessors wholescale felling of the site caused by the need to recover funds lost in a large scale economic disaster.

Garlic Futures....

2010-01-15T13:12:00.005Z

Garlic is being used to treat Horse Chestnut diseases. In the summer of 2009 I read this news announcement in the RHS magazine The Garden and it seemed to be so profoundly surreal I found it intriguing. It is such a hippy concept really! However it is true and it does appear from the trials published on the internet as though some very profound results have been achieved in treating two extreme problems that occur in Horse Chestnuts.

The major problem that triggered the research, which has until last year been carried out in The Netherlands, is a fairly new to Europe but invasive disease called Bleeding Canker. This is a disease caused by bacteria that breed in areas of the trees that traditional treatments cannot reach effectively. The bacteria is called Pseudomonas syringae pv. aesculi. More information is available on the website for the UK partners with the Dutch company Allicin Treecare, JCA Limited: http://www.jcaac.com/conquer.htm where they give details of techniques and photographs of the process. Their product called Allicin is pumped into the lower trunk of the tree and capillary action carries it to the rest of the tree, including the leaves, which apparently take on a garlicky aroma.

Garlic is used for treating humans for a range of fungal conditions and for blood purification and garlic capsules are widely available. It is interesting to cross-refer this post to an earlier one on the methane produced by cows and sheep here, since garlic is to be used as part of the process to curb their emissions!

The second disease that appears to be vulnerable to the Allicin treatment is the more widespread leaf miner (Cameraria ohridella). This is very interesting as it ties in a bit with the use of garlic in cooking which I have personally noticed discourages house-flies. Trees that have had the Allicin treatment in areas suffering from leaf miner attack have kept their leaves, whereas neighbouring trees have lost almost all of their leaves. The photograph that I have used shows leaf miner damage in street trees in Gdansk, Poland.

In Elliot, R & de Paoli, C Kitchen Pharmacy (1991) the authors say that the antiseptic action of garlic is effective against viruses, fungi and bacteria and that Galen called garlic the 'great panacea', which seems to be proving very true at the moment!

While all of this seems to be very positive and is very promising for the look of the greater trees in the landscape, there is a little boding disquiet in my own mind. Trees are very far from a monoculture. The oak tree is the obvious example to use, where whole communities live in the ecosystem of roots to branches. It is already obvious that invasive insects are not keen on the garlic. Is it possible that beneficial or benign insects might also be affronted? Might other organisms also be disturbed? Lichens, the journalists of air pollution, are formed through a symbiotic relationship of fungus and alga that become 'lichenised'. Garlic is being used specifically for its anti-fungal properties. I would like to see some interest taken in the lichens on the treated trees, maybe they could be reporters for the habitat implications? In the UK, Horse Chestnut is not a key substrate for lichens, but it is far from improbable that this technique will be used for other trees under other circumstances and could in future be taken up in tree nurseries. It is a brilliant technique, but the wider implications do need to be considered while it is still young. At the moment it is far from cheap to innoculate a tree. This may not always be the case and as responsible adults it may be important to weigh up several pros against some cons.

Ways of Seeing....

2010-01-13T20:14:00.009Z

"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." –- Henry Miller
As a child I would dream of travelling the world. It seemed to me that all of the rest of the world was exotic and exciting, it was home that wasn't. Of course it isn't that straightforward, especially when 'in transit', but the largest surprise that I got was completely unexpected. When you travel, you take your feet with you! You can feel the ground firmly beneath your feet as you walk. But what also happens is that your eyes are opened
- to the fact of different objects and different histories
- to the different ways that people lead their lives in their own countries
- to the SAME ways that people can lead their lives is also intriguing
Familiar objects occur in different shapes, yet still perform the same tasks that we expect to see done.

A recent visit to North Africa has opened my eyes to the African continent. I now believe that it is not possible to do anything more profound than visit a country, or continent, to begin to see into its patterns of life. To be truly spurred to investigate its history and culture. As a child I queued with thousands of others to visit the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. It is a fantastic collection, the collection of artefacts from the excavation from the Valley of the Kings and I was enthralled. To see it in Cairo Museum is to experience so much more. For a start it is amongst other less exotic but highly significant objects, and these give it more context. It is also part of Egypt's history and the dustiness of Egypt is important too, despite the reality that there was a smaller Sahara in Tutankhamun's day. Watching Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile has more meaning now because of this short visit and the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the Sudan have taken on more relevance for me when they are shown on the TV.

Other countries also have road signs, to manage traffic, and they can be fascinating. Ireland, for example, has a very small, spoonlike spade on the roadwork signs compared to ours. Istanbul has joined the small number of countries that not only show the length of time that you have to wait at a junction to cross it as a pedestrian, but also traffic lights show how long you have to wait as a driver. Denmark has separate traffic lights for cyclists (I like that idea). The Americas have lorries. Of course. We see them in the movies. But their lorries have noses! Seeing American lorries in reality, is one of the ways to realise that as viewers of multi-national cultural drama or documentaries we can be very unobservant, or block out those things that we don't relate to. Some cultural oddities crop up in particular places. In Riga, Latvia there is a bridge where newly-weds have taken to putting padlocks on the bridge and throwing away the key as a luck charm. Apparently this is now happening in Florence, Italy and also elsewhere in the Baltic states.

One of the features that I look at when travelling is drainage covering. It can be very interesting to notice the creativity that can go into the design of such mundane details. My favourite to date comes from La Serena, near Coquimbo in Chile and is in the form of a seahorse. The design is profoundly practical, simple and elegant. Some countries have simple style designs for the covers, but the interest lies in the scripts employed. Cyrillic in Slavic or Russian countries, Arabic in Arabic speaking countries, or a mix of languages as can happen in mixed language countries such as Turkey or anywhere the covers will have been cast across national borders.

When we start to open our eyes to what is around us when we travel, we start to learn to value the world in which others live. Their histories are different to those we think we know, and we benefit greatly from an understanding of this. A visit to Dover Castle occurred shortly after their recent renovations. One intriguing feature of the day of the visit was the selection of the scent of the wood burnt on an open fire. In the early Middle Ages the knights returning from their time in the east returned with eastern traditions and games as they had experienced them in their own travels, and scented woodburning was one of many that they introduced. Apparently backgammon also came to us via this route. It is not possible for school history lessons or for the TV to teach us everything. It can, when done well, teach us to be interested to learn more. Or life and direct experience can.

Copenhagen Foundations

2009-12-19T19:06:00.008Z

As a complete coincidence this post is about Copenhagen, for personal reasons (I promised my brother I would do it) and because it is about a sculpture/fountain that I find impressive, rather than for any long-standing hangup about meetings about climate change.

As with almost all capital cities across the world, Copenhagen has a good number of significant sculptures and monuments. The most iconic, of course, is the Little Mermaid, who sits elegantly on a small rock in Oresond, just on the edge of central Copenhagen. She was commissioned by Carlsberg chief executive Carl Jacobsen in 1909, from Edward Eriksen and for such a tiny statue receives very large numbers of visitors. Just along the quay stands a less ethereal modern mermaid, who stands outside the tourist office with jutting chest confusing the occasional simple-minded tourist.

In the other direction lies an altogether more impressive sculptural fountain, also commissioned by Carlsburg, for their 50^th anniversary (1897), with the fountains in working order in 1908. This fountain lies next to the Citadel and represents the traditional myth of the foundation of the city of Copenhagen. The goddess Gefjon was challenged by the king Gylfi to plough as much land as she could in one night. All the land that she ploughed would be hers. Previously she had borne four sons and she changed them into oxen, attached them to a plough, and between them they ploughed the land area that now makes up the island in Copenhagen known as Zealand. The sculptor was Anders Bundgaard, a Dane who studied in Italy and returned to Denmark in time to create this powerful representation of determination and devotion. The water in the fountain may not be a major firework display, but the power of the surge through the nostrils of the oxen and the movement implied by the jets next to the wheels of the cart carrying the goddess is very effective. I love the elegance and poignancy of the Little Mermaid, but for sheer power of will and demonstrable strength, I have to confess to a preference for the Gefion Fountain (Gefionspringvandet in Danish).

Flatulence and Biodiversity

2009-12-13T15:43:00.008Z

The Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change (COP15) is due to step up a gear in the next week. Much has been written both for and against the concept that our climate is undergoing change induced by man. As a geography undergraduate in the early 1980's I was taught that the changes that were starting to be seen even then were the result of actions taken in the Industrial Revolution! For me that has always been a rather sobering thought, and my own view as a result has been that less emphasis should be put on the debate as to causes and more on the moral and ethical reasons to act to reduce our polluting of the world as soon as possible. None of us is very keen to have other people's litter in our front gardens, and yet many of our actions are polluting the world for future generations.

The media have concentrated a great deal on carbon dioxide as the gas to be concerned about in all of this. As with everything that anyone comments upon, the truth is far more complex. Carbon dioxide is used as a measure for future warming, but there are several other gases that can play a very significant role in the future health of planetary life, the behaviour of which is cause for concern and the emissions of which it could be a good idea to scale back. These gases include:
Carbon dioxide (CO2)
Methane (CH4)
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
Perfluorocarbons (PFCs)
Sulphur Hexafluoride (SF6)
Water vapour (H2O)
Ozone (O3)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6711445/Copenhagen-climate-summit-eight-greenhouse-gases-and-what-they-do.html

A major role in the climate warming debate is also given by scientists to methane, which has been identified as having a far more significant role in the trapping of heat in the atmosphere than the more talked about carbon dioxide. This gas is given off through the biodegrading of organic material as it rots (landfill), as it reacts with air in a waterlogged state (peat and sphagnum bogs) or as it is digested (flatulence in humans and other animals).

Over the past 2 years detailed research into the methane production of cows has been undertaken for DEFRA by the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at Aberystwyth University as part of a 3 year contract. This research has involved looking at the results of some intriguing methods of 'catching' the flatulent methane, such as an Argentinian project catching emissions using plastic bags, and placing the animals in plastic tunnels at Aberystwyth University (although sheep behaved better in the plastic tunnels, apparently, with fewer escape plans). The research has been aimed in particular at identifying methods of reducing methane emissions in farm livestock.

Some interim results that were published earlier in the project suggest that, contrary to popular belief, cows burp more than they fart. What makes this research relevant to this blog, is that it has also gone into the digestive behaviour of cows and whether a change of diet has an effect upon their flatulence. At present, the majority of cattle farming is undertaken on fields that are planted with perennial ryegrass and no other grass. It isn't hard to see how this could be very useful research. I, personally, know what the effects of eating baked beans or over-cooked sprouts are on my own methane production....

Cows appear to belch a great deal less if their diet consists of a mixed fare of grass species in flower, white clover and bird's foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). This actually means that fields that look more attractive to most of us are (arguably) better for everything, and that species poor, improved perennial ryegrass pasture is (arguably) not better for everyone. This next year coming up has been given the name the Year of Biodiversity. It is an interesting thought that in 2010, when the report on cow methane production is published, (unless something very strange happens) it will promote a chain of actions that will help to address climate change gas production, but that it will also help in the promotion of biodiversity through the increase in diversity of seed mixes for cropping for meat and dairy cow farming. Personally, I would really like to see a large scale return to the traditional wildflower meadow, but at least the promotion of more variety in the seeding of these fields will look a great deal more attractive and also have the benefits of digestive health for the animals and methane emissions will be lessened.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article2051364.ece

Landscape Architecture

2009-12-06T18:08:00.002Z

For this first post I will take the opportunity to explain the title of the Blog. Almost all UK Landscape Architects will have stories to tell of trying to get over the idea of what a Landscape Architect does. It occupies more time for us than it should at social events and also at professional events as well. In the old days we would joke that friends of the family would chuckle and say "Oh, you can do my garden then!" when told we were Landscape Architects, a comment that we should see as more of a challenge than we usually do. In my experience this has been happening less and less, and in fact I am usually faced by a blank and confused expression and the need to 'explain'. In my 'explanation' I almost always use the presence of bollards in almost all town centres as a first example of where the profession is actually focussed. I am not intending to be rude, and I do hope that none of this is taken as rude or aggressive. We do have to keep up a public profile that has, unfortunately, been lessening, in spite of some incredible design achievements in the past several years.

A couple of months ago I went to a small networking event run by the Federation of Small Businesses. This event was to promote the idea of 'speed networking', which actually turns out to be brilliant! A similar event the previous year had been a complete no-show for me as a 'Landscape Architect', so this year I had gone radical. I said when the subject came up that I was a 'Photographer and Landscape Architect'. The blank faces weren't there. Each and every one of the people that I met that day said, enthusiastically, "Oh what a wonderful thing to do, that sounds very interesting!" They could cope because they recognised the photographer bit.

A few days later I mentioned this to an Egyptian friend who said immediately, "but a Landscape Architect, that gives the idea that you must do so much, and yet no-one would do so much as that". Virtually all Landscape Architects do MORE than the name implies, we should really call ourselves Landscape Polymaths! The problem for the profile of this name for what we do lies in the fact that most of the work done is at its best when it is appreciated but not noticed! Changing the name wouldn't change this situation.

Landscape Architecture is an exciting and hugely valuable profession. The huge variety of projects covered is just a part of the role played in our public worlds. Yes some people do gardens as well as public spaces, and some garden designers design public places. We talk about the 'Sense of Place' in good design or landscape management. This is also important in landscape characterisation - that can help the planning system accommodate (or not) new development. Awareness of the value of psychological well-being and the interaction with other professionals such as environmental psychologists can help with designing out crime or at least trying to minimise the sense of isolation that can lead to crime hotspots.

In this blog I hope to make comment on designs I have seen and value, maybe occasionally also designs that don't quite seem to work, but not those often, because this is something I wish to celebrate rather than to knock. I have been privileged to see some fantastic sculptures around the world and those should crop up regularly. As a researcher I get to read widely and sometimes some real nuggets come up that I will attempt to share. For the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit over the next 2 weeks, I will add in a bit about cows and methane, because this has such a wide relevance for all landscape and ecological professionals.

I do also need to add that the British Landscape Institute has a website for the promotion of Landscape Architecture as a career at http://iwanttobealandscapearchitect.com