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