Hackney’s Top Secret

St Mary’s Secret Garden in Hackney is true to its name. A real gem, moments away from Hoxton station, where horticultural therapy and training for people with mental health issues, learning difficulties and other health problems take place successfully in the heart of the community. Its secret is to blend together excellent horticultural and community practice, winning last year both the first prize for Hackney in Bloom (Best Voluntary Garden – Professional) and the Green Flag Community Award.

You may not know that, as well as hosting Gardeners' World, Monty Don is also a supporter of Thrive, the organisation which established St Mary’s Secret Garden twenty years ago. Emerging from the ashes of a council depot, the garden has grown and developed over this time, but still retains some of the founding volunteers and clients who first made the garden what it is.

 

The focus is on food growing, but there are different delights to the garden every corner you turn. On arrival there is a welcoming bench at reception and then a path through the wild garden lures children and adults alike away on a bug trail. Bees buzz happily around, and produce such a popular honey that it has a local waiting list and has also made the grade for sale at Borough Market. The heart of the garden is given over to training the many clients who benefit enormously from the space. A trainer was gently introducing people to sowing when I visited, exhorting them to first feel the seeds in their hands before committing them to the soil. The fame of the compost produced on site is also spreading and a cyclist stopped by to buy a bag for her balcony garden in one of the nearby tower blocks. The first early potatoes were late but there was a healthy crop of broad beans and lettuce – all carefully protected from the voracious London pigeons. A new 'Wish You Well' garden is open for everyone to enjoy, sporting mosaics produced with the help of a volunteer artist, and flowers to soothe the senses.

 

 



Innovative signs lead you around the garden – made by the Ministry of Stories and involving local children in conjuring up rhymes and poems. Plants spill out of drawers and all manner of objects, all found abandoned locally, including a child’s car seat. Sempervivum is very happy in a yellow sink top and fuchsia in a kettle.

There are impressive arrays of plants and herbs to buy, carefully nurtured in the greenhouse and polytunnel. The volunteers will be working hard this week to prepare for their opening for Open Garden Squares Weekend on June 8th and 9th – they will be packing their garden with all manner of things to buy. Sadly, funding for such excellent initiatives as this is diminishing with the changes to benefits - and funding from social services is down;  so buying the jam, the chutney or the lavender bags, as well as the plants, is truly making sure your money supports a good cause. They also hope that there will be natural beauty products for sale, made by a local pop-up produce project and Hackney Young Carers, along with lots of tea, coffee and cakes.

And, as you stagger away, after buying all the wonderful stuff on offer, you can pop into the gardens of the nearby Geffrye Museum, before you get the train back from Hoxton.

Information on visiting St Mary's Secret Garden

A Hidden Hinterland to Canary Wharf

It’s only one stop on the train from the Bank of England, but the abundance of herbs, flowers, birds and bees would have you forget you are in the midst of a global city when you arrive at Cable Street Community Gardens. Look up and there looms Canary Wharf, with two smaller tower blocks flanking the site, and the Docklands Light Railway running right through the middle. Step through the arches of the railway and you are in another world.

When I arrived, spring had just begun, the celandines were in bloom, the cow parsley was waist high and a wood-pigeon was having a sneaky bird-bath amidst the foliage that covered the wildlife spot next to Cable Street. This part of the gardens is given over to nature, and a garden volunteer turns up twice a day to keep the bird feeders full for the many different species that have discovered this soup-kitchen for birds. There are bats in the evening and tales of a parrot and a kestrel who once lived here too. And the bees – look out for a modern, green, plastic beehive on one of the plots and the story goes that the plot grower and bee keeper met her husband here, when he came to photograph the unusual-looking hive. That’s just one of the many ways in which these gardens have affected the lives of its growers for the better.


 The cow parsley was waist high and a wood-pigeon was having a sneaky bird-bath amidst the foliage.

The gardens started through a campaign by Friends of the Earth in 1977 to reclaim derelict land in the city. A few years later and the Cable Street Community Gardens Association had been formed. Its success has been such that it has spilled out from the two small strips behind tin fencing which were its origins to a 50-plot site traversing both sides of the Docklands Light Railway, with another 10 plots round the corner in Glamis Street. Relationships with the convent, church and schools have flourished, as have those with the council and bankers in Canary Wharf, who have helped with funding and support. Many a commuter’s journey home has been cheered by looking down on the space and finding a gardener or their children smiling and waving back at them. One gardener has kept the convent in rhubarb for many years and everyone talks of who they donate their produce to. When you see blackcurrant bushes growing as high as your head with strings of fruit forming, you know that this is a fertile and special place.

The vegetables represent different countries and continents – from Japan to India to Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. English cockneys dig side by side with new-found friends from many corners of the earth. All are Londoners. Money from the banks had just been spent on some new benches, beautifully engraved with the names of growers who have passed away, and a granddaughter of one had come to remember the good days of her childhood, when she helped her grandfather sow potatoes and ride the donkeys on the open days. He had been born in Cork (where there is another bench for him outside a betting office) and had worked on the Thames Barrier before he eventually found Cable Street and started his gardening career.

The open day for the gardens is now held on the Open Garden Squares Weekend and the organisers are trying to see if they can find any donkeys this year – but if they don’t manage to, they promise the most amazing food of bread, cakes and pastries (nothing shop-bought), a pottery sale and a local history tour, as well as a bric-à-brac sale.  The area oozes history – it’s not just confined to the Cable Street name – and you can drink in one of London’s oldest pubs, the Prospect of Whitby, after you have taken in the delights of the gardeners and their produce, and sampled the bit of inner-city magic they have made together. 

Information on visiting Cable Street Community Gardens »

Spot the Hobbit

My visit to the SHARE project was on one of the bitterest March days of our endless winter. A day when simply getting out and facing the cold took courage. And yet here were horticultural trainees happily braving the wind and weaving backwards and forwards across the gardens, sowing and tending new plants, for the Open Garden Squares weekend in June. The sweet peas were climbing their frame and lettuces and miniature daffodils were invitingly on sale.

SHARE is a community horticulture project for adults with learning difficulties and disabilities with approximately 30 trainees. It is a hidden surprise, beside a golf course in the grounds of Springfield Hospital, where 150 years ago male patients took their exercise in the Male Airing Court, and grew vegetables for the inmates, in a time when Springfield was the Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum. The men grew vegetables in those days and were separated from the women, who took their exercise amongst flowers and herbaceous borders in another nearby space. Now both men and women work and train alongside and the flowers, herbs and vegetables are happy together as well.  

There are no inmates now from the hospital in the project, but there are strong links between the two organisations and the trainees maintain flower beds in the hospital grounds. Several trainees have developed their horticultural skills to the extent of achieving horticultural qualifications – the NVQ levels 1 and 2 in work-based horticulture and plant production are taught in the garden. Some have also found work outside in gardens. The project has developed extensive propagation facilities – there are two working polytunnels and a new, soon to be heated, large glasshouse. The trainees have a history of selling their produce locally to a neighbouring allotment (The Beatrix Potter allotment), and they also undertake a variety of external commercial work in Wandsworth and Roehampton. The fruits of their labours are also turned into delicious jams and pickles by their sister catering project in Battersea. This is definitely the place to come for buying jars of chutney and plants at bargain prices during the Open Garden Squares weekend of June 8th and 9th. Herbs, vegetables and annuals were already starting to sprout in anticipation when I visited.

The community links of SHARE are impressive. It’s a Capital Growth Project and modern training outfit with links on Facebook and Twitter. Nearby lies Streatham Cemetery, where the Friends of Streatham Cemetery have established five beehives. So SHARE are busy building raised beds, which will be planted up with bee-friendly plants for the bees to forage. And, as well as gardening, the trainees have been out and about to their local college, South Thames College, to raise awareness about disability.  

 SHARE Community Garden on a warmer day

Visitors to SHARE on the Sunday of Open Garden Squares Weekend will also have the opportunity to visit a couple of new gardens in the area, the Tooting Community Garden and the Streatham Common Community Garden at The Rookery.  SHARE are hoping to perhaps have a small exhibition too, maybe of art work, or the work of another local charity, so there should be plenty to do and see. There’s a living willow mosaic and a rose arbour, where you can sit and contemplate, or maybe settle in a seat by the pond. My top tip is to wander to the little hillock on the side of the garden, where the trainees have lovingly recreated a hobbit house. Needless to say, it was too cold when I visited to see the hobbit, who must have been tucked up inside by a warm coal fire.

Visiting SHARE Community Garden »

A Permanent Exhibit

When you put the words Garden and Tate Modern together, you conjure up images of beautiful but angular, minimalist spaces. Silver birch trees planted in rectangles, swaying in the wind next to crisp gravel paths or precise green lawns.  Beside this vista hides Tate Modern's Community Garden, secluded behind a galvanised steel grid, across which ivy has been grown. The observant passer-by will spot the windows in the ivy and inside the contrast reveals itself, for the Community Garden is round and curvy, with angularity confined to the rectangular plots on which the garden was built.

Hugging a side space on the Thames side of Tate Modern, near the Millennium Bridge, the garden was started in 2004 and opened to local residents living within walking distance in 2007.  It's a collaborative venture between the Bankside Open Spaces Trust and the gallery.  When Tate Modern was built in the enormous power station by the river, the lives of residents, Southwark and indeed London changed forever, for it turned out to be the front runner of a plethora of cultural regeneration projects along the south side of the river. Residents had to live with the enormous disruption of year-on-year major building projects; so the commitment of Tate Modern to community involvement and the emergence of the Bankside Open Spaces Trust were welcome indeed. Now, although many of the new riverside apartments may sell for astronomical sums, gardens are not a common feature, so this communal garden serves its purpose well, as evidenced by the fact that it has over 700 people registered as friends and an average of 300 visits per month.

With additional external funding from the Metropolitan Parks and Gardens Association, the garden's curved spaces and pond have been planted with over 100 different species, reflecting a mixture of indigenous and Mediterranean climates and designed in a muted colour scheme. When I visited for the Open Garden Squares Weekend, it was a glorious winter's day - bitingly cold but with the odd waft of warmth from a clear blue sky. A volunteer was digging over the soil hardened by snow and frost to reveal hellebores. Three varieties of hellebore have been planted- Helleborus niger, Helleborus argutifolius and Helleborus orientalis - but it was the simple Helleborus niger which stole the show and my heart.  By June, when the garden opens to the public, the hellebores and bulbs will have disappeared, but the Mediterranean plants, the pond, the rose pergola and the ferns nestling amongst logs will take over to delight you. Fruit bushes and herbs will also be budding and scenting the air.  Pond life should be thriving – this one is home to newts, frogs, dragon and damsel flies.  There used to be over 100 goldfish, but a heron flew by and gobbled them all up on one visit!  Nonetheless, despite the heron, this continues to be a favourite spot for pond dipping for local schoolchildren. 

The garden started out as a wildflower garden in 2007.  The soil was rubble from the building work and the flowers loved the poor conditions. Beautiful though they were, the garden was too small a space to limit itself to the short flowering season of wildflowers and gradually the mixed planting was introduced, along with a lot of compost and tender loving care.

The garden contains some beautiful seating, and wooden features, all designed and built by Arthur De Mowbray, who specialises in garden structures for the public arena.  The shelter near the entrance is particularly striking.  From it you can look out across the length of the garden.  Beautiful places to sit, look and contemplate are important.   The litter bins are also bespoke – with wooden shells as lids.  And the courtyard walls are adorned with round plates of art – produced by older local people using concrete and objects found on the nearby river shore.

The Community Garden is definitely worth a visit.  Afterwards, you can pop into the gallery, where there’s a café and shop and, of course, lots of modern art.  Not that the garden isn’t also art – this is Tate Modern’s permanent exhibit.

Information on visiting the Community Garden at Tate Modern

See how it looks in the summer

An Eccentric’s Delight

The volunteers at the Roe Green Walled Garden describe themselves as eccentrics, and they typify the very best of English eccentricity. A recreated, life-sized figure of a gardener from the 1901 census greets visitors as they arrive, to remind them of the late-Victorian heritage of the original walled garden built for the Duchess of Sutherland in 1899.

Even the Duchess of Sutherland has been recreated in life-size form and she sits proudly in the bric-à-brac shed, which is the hidden life-blood of the garden. Volunteers don’t just garden here: they rummage in skips and have become expert in recycling scrap metal and selling anything they can to maintain a good income stream for their lovely garden.

The garden is designed around children – not only does a teddy bears' picnic area occupy part of the lawn, but there is an active kids' newt club, which looks after the great crested newts in the wildlife pond – and the local mayor even visited to open the insect hotel the children built. A yew has been clipped into the shape of a dog and throughout there’s lots to keep children amused and interested in wildlife and gardening.

The garden started when volunteers started to take over maintenance of the nearby Fryent Country Park. At first they stored their tools at home, then a shed was given to them on the site of the old walled garden and then they recreated the garden from the rubble of the old one. Now they proudly display their gardening awards – in 2012 the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) declared the garden ‘outstanding’ in the ‘It's Your Neighbourhood’ category, and they also hold the Green Flag Community Award for biodiversity. The rose pergola which leads to the first of their two ponds has been rebuilt and replanted, alongside a Devon bank, a rockery, a dry-stone wall and fern garden. Along the length of the plot lies the long herbaceous border, a glorious display of colour in summer.

Small vegetable plots with Welsh onions and espalier apple trees line another side of the garden. Volunteers garden the plots together and share the produce. Compost is made in abundance and the gardeners continually seek out innovation – recently having successfully grafted mistletoe onto an old apple tree. A new ‘Core Blimey’ apple tree has just been planted – specially promoted by the London Orchard Project for its resistance and suitability for cities.

The garden is host to a rain measurement centre for the Environment Agency and, buoyed on by this, they are now monitoring the weather in other ways as well for their own recreation. A beehive has been started, log piles are strategically placed to attract insects, they’ve created a home for three or four hedgehogs, mute swans have visited and bats have been spotted in the nearby country park.

Visiting the garden next June is highly recommended. There will be hot food, vegetarian curry being a house special, as well as sandwiches and cakes, lots of children’s activities, bric-à-brac and plant sales. A beautiful, peaceful place with lots to keep the whole family interested – don’t miss it.

Growing food amongst the rubble

You may have marvelled at the new St Pancras and King's Cross stations, and stared in disbelief at the transformation taking place in this area of London. But did you know that, whilst these new massive structures were being created, amongst the rubble of the old, a community garden was busy growing food from skips, with a little help from the local builders?

The Skip Garden was started in 2004 by Global Generation with the initial aim of taking kids to the country. They then decided to bring the country to the city at King's Cross and the garden has moved its skips and makeshift structures several times as the buildings around it have been completed. The garden has strong links with the building companies in the area and uses recycled materials from the King's Cross reconstruction site. Even the skips are disused ones and have been adapted to create walk-in gardens. Amongst an array of plants and activity, there’s a potager skip and an orchard skip, each with very close plantings, but very healthy plants, all due to the care spent on recycling. A cunning water recycling scheme links all the skips and planters and is supplemented by a wormery, composting and comfrey juice extraction to ensure that the soil is the very best – as it needs to be in this environment. The aim is to show that food can be grown anywhere – and it succeeds. For keen urban gardeners, there are lots of lessons and tips to be gained on how to grow vegetables organically, using the resources you find around you.

Growing vegetables is used for educational purposes with young people, known as generators, recruited to help. They now sell produce to the many trendy restaurants which have sprung up in the area and have a makeshift kitchen where they host lunch and learning events every two months for the local community and produce jam and chutney for sale. The students from Central St Martin's have got involved, so now vegetables are also being grown to use as dyes. The fabric and materials they have helped create will also be on display.

It is the sight of fruit trees flourishing in skips and saffron harvested from a bed of crocuses which inspires the visitor. Bat boxes have been constructed amongst the vegetables and the wild, overrun banks of rubble nearby have been planted with bee-friendly plants.

The Skip Garden is not usually open to the public, but over Open Garden Squares Weekend on June 8th and 9th you can visit it and for the first time sample the delights of its kitchen as well as its garden. Paul and Silvia and the generators will organise a tour of the skips, the recently constructed yurt, the clay pizza ovens and the chance will be yours to see at first hand how vegetables and herbs of all kinds can be produced in such small spaces.

Who would have thought such a garden existed behind the cranes which dominate the King's Cross skyline? And when your visit is over, there are several other gardens to visit nearby, and the chance to sample the delights of this newly-recreated area of London.

Further information on visiting the Skip Garden »

In the Shadow of the Great and Good

You may know Kensington's Holland Park. You may have visited the Dutch Garden and the Japanese Garden. You may even have attended an opera - with peacock accompaniment. But you have probably not visited the secret garden that takes part in Open Garden Squares Weekend and where you can gain the best idea of the original architecture of Holland House.

A Distinguished History

The original house was built in 1607 for Sir Walter Cope, James I’s Chancellor, whose heiress married Sir Henry Rich, later Earl of Holland. Rich built the magnificent stables (since largely rebuilt, with a splendid modern sequence of murals depicting a garden party held in the 1870s by the then Earl of Ilchester) and the coach house, west of Holland House, beyond which is the Dutch Garden with its intricate beds of triangles and rectangles. The back wall now forms part of the Belvedere restaurant, and past the toddlers ’play area is the Orangery and the rose garden.

In front of the line of brick arches, formerly part of the old stable block, now a hard surfaces area with benches, was where the 3rd Lady Holland raised some of the first dahlias to be grown in England, in the early 1800s.

By 1860, when the 4th and last Lord Holland died, his widow came into increasing financial difficulties and Holland Park only now survives because in 1874 Henry Edward Fox-Strangways, 5th Earl of Ilchester and a descendant of the 1st Lord Holland, agreed to take the mortgaged estate in return for allowing the dowager Duchess to live at Holland House for the rest of her life. The 5th Earl added a water and rock garden in the 1890s and a Japanese garden (to the north of the Dutch garden), which, fifty years after the WW2 bombing, was re-created with Anglo-Japanese funding.

An Admirable Present

During WW2 the house was bombed and destroyed by fire. Afterwards the remains of one wing were repaired. With new buildings designed by Sir Hugh Casson and Neville Condor, this now forms the King George VI Memorial Youth Hostel, officially opened by HM the Queen in 1959. With 10 rooms and 200 beds, it serves 50,000 hostellers a year, mainly in groups.

The Gardens

The public gardens, including the Dutch Garden and the Japanese Garden, lie mainly to the west of the house, though they extend south of the surviving garden front, with the famous Inigo Jones gates.

The special part of the garden, which takes part in Open Garden Squares Weekend, lies within the grounds of the youth hostel on the east side and is normally only visible through the perimeter gates. From here you can gain the best idea of the original architecture of Holland House, with its arcading and Dutch gables. There is a large well-stocked pond, visited by mallards, moorhens, herons and peacocks.

Open Garden Squares Weekend

Holland House Garden will be open to Open Garden Squares Weekend visitors on Sunday 9th June 2013 from 10am to 5pm. Tea and coffee will be available - and a barbecue if the weather permits.

The garden is a convenient one to visit between gardens to the south of Kensington, such as Edwardes Square, and those to the north, such as Ladbroke Square.

Further Reading

• London Gardens Online
• Wikipedia
• Visiting Holland House Garden