City gardening: do you like to get your hands in the soil?

Humans were not meant to be so remote from Mother Nature as perhaps many of us are who live in towns and cities.  In the UK, councils have started to set-up allotments on spare pieces of land perhaps besides a railway or between roads.  Some councils have chosen to allow residents to grow vegetables where formerly municipal flowers were planted.

In London where I live, I have managed to get an allotment allocated to our family.  To help children learn where their food comes from, the allotment only allows 20% of your patch to be given over to flowers.  The council gardeners encourage you to grow flowers that attract bees such as sun flowers or nasterchiums whose flowers you can eat in a salad.

These small allotments, a box of one square metre and some grow bags or flower pots, bring so many benefits.  To name but a few:

• people talk to you in the garden, wow wonderful in an anonymous city.
• a community has developed naturally in the garden with people sharing gardening tips and produce.
• Mother Nature has arrived – bees, butterflies, worms, dragon flies, birds, foxes…..

I have been nurturing a naturally seeded thistle.  Most would regard it a weed and I had to fiercely protect it on the garden community clear up day.  My thistle is now about 4 feet tall and is just breaking out into flower.  Many people have not seen a thistle in full growth and are surprised at the beauty of it’s flowers.  The bees love the flowers.

The thistle is the national flower for Scotland. In truth, no one knows for certain how the purple-flowered thistle rose to such lofty significance. But one legend has it a sleeping party of Scots warriors were saved from ambush by an invading Norse army when one of the enemies trod on the spiky plant.  His anguished cry roused the slumbering warriors who duly vanquished the invader and adopted the thistle as their national symbol.

Of course, there is not a shred of evidence to support this account, but it certainly makes a good story.

It would be great if all councils offered allotments.  Perhaps you should lobby yours to join in.