Cross Fire

Ok, no shots were fired in this guerrilla exercise. However my partner in grime, W, did say 'If I tackle you suddenly its because I've just seen something you haven't.' There was a hairy moment when some young teenage boys were running around the pits - and therefore us - attacking each other with a block of wood and a belt. Luckily an adult man efficiently intervened and we managed to continue. Not without interruption. A couple of women stood strangely close to me as I was weeding out the stinging nettles and asked me for groundsel for their rabbit. I pulled some up and turned back to the pit. Eventually they stopped staring and went on their way.

We added some mixed pots of crocosmia, iris foetidissima, california poppies and probably some random ok weeds. I also dug up the now quite large but suffering hardy geranium from underneath the mighty Acanthus and transplanted it in bits to the other side of the pit. Technically a tough plant, easy to transplant and propagate but NX is a random environment... Luckily it has been raining so they should make it...

We also put in 3 pots of wild strawberries - swiftly spotted by a wandering forager who proceeded to extol the virtues of pan-fried Hogweed. 

I did think the beds were relatively tidy - the russian sage looked like someone had roughly chopped it back and there is now an Elder sprouting from behind it.Is there another gardener in the 'hood?

Friend of Borage doing well

The Fig is hanging on

Bay tree doing fine, Holly apparently not.

At last another Acanthus resists being pulled up

  

In the pit at the other end the mystery continues. The Vinca takes advantage and is growing away as is a Hollyhock, but all the shrubs are dead. I'm really not sure what to do about this - this was a nice habitat for sparrows. At first it seemed like poison, but why are only the shrubs affected? Tell the council and risk total annihilation? 

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New Forest, New Cross

Since hearing that New Cross Road is one of the most polluted in the country I've become more determined to green it up. My enquiries suggest that getting the council to plant more trees is really hard work and in some of the sites that I think are desirable - in the emerging pavement cafe culture - impractical due to the traffic camera sight-lines and other bureaucratic stuff. So lobbying Boris on the evils of diesel in slow-moving city traffic is the longterm solution for the toxic air.

But in the short-term I have taken it into my own hands and risked planting a Fig tree and a Bay in the middle of the raised beds near the Launderette and Reyna Restaurant. They are bang in the middle of the beds so hopefully will be less obvious for the vandals who have yanked stuff out before. Actually my lovely fellow conspirator Wood put those two in, while I added another red hot poker, more mint, and did the usual litter clean up. We also put in two sarcococca (winter box) in the more shaded bed (where my friend Rosie has recently put in some more Hollyhocks). We got water for the trees from the fine folk at the LP Bar. Bay trees are slow but solid growing evergreens that can make a 7ft tree if left alone. Figs can get enormous but there will be some root restriction in that raised bed (which will be good for fruit production).

I need to go back with a decent camera to snap all the pits - lots of things are doing really well including Acanthus and a large day lily (I'm optimistic these will flower this summer). You can see the Leucanthemum daisies springing up in the top pic showing the Bay tree with one of the Acanthus in the far corner.

More anon.

Southern Cross

With the tireless aid of Jan van Duppen (who also shot these photos), I went back to the New Cross pits to see what survived the heat, vandals, the sunflower domination and, again as it turns out, the over-enthusiasm of some of the sunflower volunteers, and also to plant some more perennials. I thought we were going to coincide with the sunflower team harvesting seeds for next year but they got there before us and stripped out the tatty dying annual planting. So, while Jan was fascinated with the degree of rubbish left in these pits (chicken bones, bottles, cans, plastic, pens...), I could tell they had actually been cleaned up and this was light traffic! 

So after several bags of rubbish removal, we tidied up the insanely congested iris rhizomes (I would still love to chop these up and redistribute them for an even vaster sea of iris...) and planted anew. Rosemary, Leucanthem (shasta daisy), Verbena Bonariensis and Japanese Anemone went in. I hope they stay... This was the spot where I planted wild carrots (which were doing great until the Sunflowers drowned them out) and an Aquilegia (hopefully that seeded before equally losing out to the yellow forest). The new plants are all tough, invasive and nectar rich - ideal for this location. They are also perennial - so year round greenery and less labour intensive in terms of care (in theory).

You can see in the corner of these two pits two of the Kniphofia (Red Hot Poker) that I planted with Rosie (out of about 8 that went in). Fingers crossed they make it too...

This pit is also the former scene of the Teasel that got yanked out and dropped by some idiot, twice. But the Hardy Geranium is surviving - there were also some Crocosmia here and Rudbeckia (which may have been 'weeded out' by team sunflower...).

Ending on a slightly more positive note, here are the survivors in the biggest pit:

an Acanthus, a Hollyhock, a Hardy Geranium (donated by @LewishamGardens) and some emerging shoots of an Arum Lily. The alchemilla and dogwood that @LewishamGardens also supplied did not survive the heat/sunflower domination, sigh. There were 2 other Acanthus planted that had re-emerged from previous over-zealous weeding but hopefully this one is sufficiently large not to be misrecognised.

Parting tips today:

when guerrilla gardening you can be more weed tolerant than in a private garden!

Why?:

• 'weeds' may be planted by someone else...
• only the super-invasive matting weeds are a problem, mostly other plants are green and have flowers and thus nectar. In the case of nectar-filled dandelions they help break up the soil too...

Hardcore

Happened to be walking past the beds next to the former Job Centre on Camberwell Green and snapped the progress of these totally untended plants. I havent touched them for at least a year, nice to see several spikes of Hollyhocks and the skeletal frame of a Teasel (which means it will have seeded). Its still an extended rubbish dump but at least these guys made it through - transplanted from Dog Kennel Hill.

Hot bed

When I was a child growing up in Sussex we spent all 'summer' hoping that at some point the temperatures would hit 70 degrees, ideally coinciding with a weeks holiday in Cornwall. It rarely did (apart from in 1976).  This is the second year in a row my patch has fried due to No Rain. Yes, ironically I am writing this after the weather has broken and we have had quite a bit of rain for a day, off the back of Hurricane Bertha. But the point remains. No rain in June, hardly any in July. Deep fried guerrilla gardens... And so it was that like last summer I met up with a lovely young man for a GG interview, this time Jan van Duppen who is studying at the OU and in exchange - tho' he needed little encouragement - we went to Dog Kennel Hill and chopped down 3 bags of dried out Hollyhocks, Michaelmas daisies and most of it really.

pre-trim (all Jan Van Duppen's photos)

I did have 2 new shorter type Verbenas and 2 experimental Cleomes, a foxglove and a couple of Lychnis to go in, but to see any improvement we need more of the wet stuff. We left a few of the teasels standing for structure (and they may still have seeds in the flower heads, which birds like to eat). On the day we two blondes needed to be rescued by my partner armed with suncream and bottled water. It was filthy hot work. Jan seemed to attract a doubting Thomas who was apparently asking who we were, implying we had no authority to be doing such things, which was true. Sadly he didnt feel strongly enough to come closer to actually have a real conversation about it, which I would have enjoyed.

Here's the short Verbena.

and here's the fennel...

I returned yesterday and cleared up 2 bags more and added in 2 more foxgloves, 1 more Lychnis and 2 Alchemilla. 3 people thanked me from their cars which was nice. Lots of the Ox-eye daisies are growing back, and the bedded-in fennel and irises have all coped very well, but otherwise it is pretty barren. Like last year I know it will green over in a lovely lush way within about a month (assuming more rain - difficult to assume!). If not this spot will be getting some Agave Americana and be renamed California.

Troop recruitment

  

For all those interested in helping out or developing your own guerrilla team. This is the main patch I have been working on, now fully recovered from the summer's drought and beautifully green, if full of weeds. The pics are from October. It runs up Dog Kennel Hill adjacent to Sainsburys in East Dulwich. In the middle of a busy road with Night Bus traffic and getting full sunshine, it is a warm patch that can protect vulnerable plants in winter but also seriously dries out and the soil quality is pretty dire. Hence the plants that the council apparently once planted here mostly died and now they only properly manage about 4 long rectangles of land with seasonal bedding (the kind of stuff that is colourful year-round but is nectar-lite and utterly pointless if you are an insect or a bird). The stuff I plant must be tough, ideally self-seeding (e.g. California Poppies) or invasive (e.g. Euphorbia) in ordinary gardens and have flowers that contain pollen. I am much more weed tolerant here - unless it is smothering other plants I let them be (things like dandelions are full of pollen anyway). I haven't planted any veg because of the quality of the soil - it would need serious improvement (bags of compost dug in), and due to the time available I have to tend it. However Giovanni (from Antennae) has given me a wonderful artichoke and I do want to try that in this patch (they always succumb to snails in my garden - but this dry patch is virtually mollusc free).

  

My ambition for Dog Kennel Hill is to plant the entire strip that the council neglect - about 3/5ths done! I have a whole load of plants waiting to get planted here so any help would be grand. I can supply a few extra pairs of gloves and waste bags, though I only have one trowel now (unless anyone wants to wield a spade...).

I've also started adding stuff in to the raised pits near the bus stops near Reyna restaurant in New Cross Road, so very near Goldsmiths, piggy-backing on the stupendous sunflower project run by New-Xing and Artmongers. This is necessary - I hate empty/neglected plant pits plus the bee crisis continues unabated, but it is more vulnerable to theft and damage than DKH. Hence I'm thinking thistle type plants like Echinops and teasels.

Future-wise, everytime I go past Peckham Fire Station on the 171 or 436 I look at the 5 or so concrete planters outside it that are empty! I'd love to plant stuff there - like some of the Hollyhocks that selfseed wildly on DKH. That would need some donated compost however, and probably someone with a car!

As long as the ground is not frozen or covered in snow, we can still plant...

Patch worked

Well. The Dog Kennel Hill patch was fried in the 4 weeks of 30degrees and no rain. In spite of 2 mad dashes with buckets and assembled friends a lot of the plants really suffered. However in the last couple of weeks there has been regular rain so I risked planting some more stuff - the usual suspects, lychnis, alchemilla, leucanthemum. More excitingly, I met up with a very sweet young man doing an anthropology degree and interested in guerrilla gardening and together we planted in 4 Verbena Bonariensis next to the irises and chopped down all the browned stems of the hollyhocks, daisies and everything else singed and burnt. A lovely middle-aged Asian man simply said 'thank you' when he was waiting by the traffic lights.
It looks a bit desecrated but give it a few weeks and this patch will rock again.

 

...and here is the petit pit in Camberwell Grove - the one place that was close enough to maintain through the heat. Plus the people from the Vineyard have helped out. Subsequently some vile person [a plague on them] pulled out one of the verbenas by the roots and just left it there. I've replaced it with small ones.  

spring forward

Lots to report. Firstly it is actually behaving like spring and thus everything is growing beautifully. Minus the plant that was stolen from Mcneil Road... Tragically I think it might have been someone seeing us team dig that spot and realised there were some interesting plants going in not 'just' weeds... I wish a plague of vine weevils on them. They nicked the bigger of the Sarcococca Confusas that I planted in January. No more of them for easy to get at spots. Actually they have struggled in Dog Kennel Hill so maybe I'll just keep them all.

Dog Kennel Hill is entering its glory days... I've just added in more Alchemilla Mollis, Lychnis and Hardy Geraniums, and weeded out 3 bags of smothering stuff. I notice that one of the Irises I planted out last summer is coming into flower! And the bronze fennels in between them are surviving. Some yellow and white daisy things are in flower plus the odd bit of vinca, and of course the euphoria of the Euphorbia. There's a bit of a task ahead to sort out section 4 which has large clumps of Hollyhocks on the edges, which is not good: they need to keep the centre line. I've got a whole load of Japanese Anemones growing in pots: a few weeks and they'll find join this patch. More pink alas, but bee-friendly.

Stories Road treepit is also triumphant

Camberwell Green raised pits next to the former job centre is ok. That has the driest, dustiest soil. But maybe the mint was pulled up from there too? The game survivor is Golden Rod (Solidago) and I think some shasta daisies (Leucanthem) plus, and of course! the hollyhocks... I added in some Giant Russian sunflower seeds and some small friends of Borage.

Camberwell Grove petit pit is still going strong

camberwell grove, even

...and today  I also spied that the ground by the railway underpass/weak bridge in the middle of 'the grove' is wet enough to dig... and I have a spare sarcococca just waiting to be re-homed...

...and this today I re-homed it in that very place, testing out how crap the soil is [which is quite crap - its only the rain that has made it at all diggable, but sarcococca can cope with dry shade just fine] and also adding in 2 hollyhocks from the forest on dog kennel hill. I also did a bit more weeding and trimming up that hill and found that there are indeed hollyhocks sprouting the whole way up amongst the weeds...I tried to make it more obvious that they are there so hopefully no council workers will weed them out.

...and previously on camberwell grove I realised that there was a new-ish small tree-pit with bare soil not concreted over, so I added in euphorbia, an aquilegia and lychnis. Its opposite The Vineyard.

Expansion

 

A view of the patch - after the Chef Solaire and I cleaned it up and transplanted some of the Hollyhocks up the central line of the strip and planted more Crocosmia, Aquilegia, Euphorbia and Hardy Geraniums. You get the sense of the scale of the beast now. For the first time people driving by made positive remarks (instead of merely lewd ones).

 

I have planted some Sarcococca Confusa to try and a. get some winter sustenance for wildlife and b. protect this purple Cordyline (its coming back to life with all this rain... but this section is otherwise pretty barren).

The next picture shows some of the diverse plants a bit more clearly - the California poppies and Sisyrinchium and unusual Euphorbia. We took quite a few Hollyhocks up to Stories Road, but there are plenty more in need of another home.

Grr

 

I've just come back from my parents' amazing garden with several more plants for this patch - the tried and trusted Euphorbia and Aquilegia, but can't hack this pissing weather. If its dry tomorrow morning [Monday 9th] I'm meeting the Chef Solaire and we'll continue the glory and thin out a few of the fearsome Hollyhocks. 

I wish other people in Peckham could be rallied - everytime I'm on the 436 I see patches that could easily be filled with plants - esp the dead/empty planters outside the firestation...and underneath the Yucca forest near the bus station... Saw some more Southwark devastation yesterday - a plot of land outside newish housing near Queens Rd station was quite overgrown - but with a fair amount of pollinating wild flowers/weeds, now stripped back to nothing. Gah.

Nothing But Flowers

Quickly snapped in the evening - but you get the drift right? Flowers! Lychnis, Daisies, California Poppies, Hollyhocks... on Dog Kennel Hill everything is going bananas. As I thought there are Hollyhocks springing up EVERYWHERE - they really need transplanting. I added in 2 x Day Lilies [poisonous to cats you know] and 1 x Liatris, and did 2 bags of rapido style weeding.