Project Twenty Five: Stamford St, London SE1

Removing the cabbage palm from Stamford Street

The cabbage palm were growing in this central London traffic island long before we started guerrilla gardening around them, but one has been doing so at an increasingly unruly and frankly wmbarassing horizontal angle. Should we let it be or try and upright it? Well after some debate Andrew 1679, Christopher 1178 and I staked it upright several weeks ago… but this was the beginning of the end. The stake was weak and the palm got blown around, roots cut and it withered. So this afternoon we sadly dug it out and carted it off to be pulped at Battersea dump.

The funeral hearse takes away the cabbage palm

Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1

Read your garden and it will tell you messages - that’s one of the techniques a practitioner of permaculture uses to plant sympathetically and create a low maintenance garden. Here for example we do not dig the soil but just occasionally add top dressing. But there is still litter to collect and that tells us messages too. I’m convinced our plastic bottle blight is the activity of one high energy drink addict. I am regularly picking up Lucozade bottles (seldom any other brand) from the same clump next to the traffic lights. Does anyone have a remedy for this? Perhaps it’s the soporific aroma of our lavender that triggers the fly tipper’s energetic outbursts. Dig deeper (metaphorically that is not of course actually) and you may even find more messages. I almost cut myself on a sharp spike pinning a letter to the ground. It was addressed “To the Urban Gardeners” and simply thanked us for our work transforming this corner of London.

The lavender field poised to bloom

This is a new duplicate blog of the content at GuerrillaGardening.org. For entries earlier than 18 June please visit GuerrillaGardening.org and read the graphic version.