Hello, it’s been awhile!

Our season has started to germinate with calls for 5 new projects in the last week! We always prioritise gardens in which you wonderful folk are doing your bit to green up your footprint!

The first new brief was a fantastic opportunity to create a wild garden in Hornsey. We are talking NO herbaceous border, NO lawn! Just a wondrous, bucolic haven for wildlife…our absolute dream. We are already visualising the wildflower meadow, the fruit and nut trees, contorted hazel, honeysuckle, akebia and other climbers covering all walls. A low level tapestry of thymes, corsican mints, and chamomile nobile as ground cover. Plants, shrubs and trees to provide pollinator nosh across the season… ! An ecological paradise.

We always prioritise projects which help our community grow. With that in mind, we are really thrilled to be working with local community group Think&Do Camden, to help rewild our borough. Following our planting of a wildflower meadow and feminist orchard at a secondary school last summer, there’s sooo much interest from schools to green their grounds: From a tiny patch of land to a long narrow strip that runs alongside a playground, we are helping schools rewild and go wildflower meadow crazy! Wildflower meadows are a good solution for schools as you don’t need to improve the soil, and they only need 2 cuts a year. They are at their best late spring and early autumn – perfect for the school year. On a more salutary note, many secondary schools are telling us that their reason for rewilding their schools are not just to help increase biodiversity, but to help improve student well-being. As we all know, it’s been a very tough couple of years. The work we do with schools is purely on a pro-bono basis. If you are involved in a local school do get them to sign up to the camdenbeeline.org.uk and we could donate to the school a free fruit tree via our project: camdenforest2025.wordpress.com or some free annual wildflower seeds.

Talking about community growing and well-being, we are delighted at the result of a big design and planting project we embarked upon at a housing coop. Brief was to not only biodiversity and encourage pollinators, but to encourage residents – who never used the gardens, to come out and meet. Six months in, and that is exactly what has happened. Here’s a before and after couple of images…

We have also been invited in the last 2 weeks to design 2 roof terraces. Roof terraces provide an interesting challenge as its very much a case of right plant right place. We love the recent brief where the emphasis planting wise is to be on ‘greens’ and ‘foilage’ A very sophisticated brief. Here’s a roof terrace we did a while ago.

Without doubt our new ‘happy place’ is the Greening your footprint garden we are currently designing and planting up at Kentish Town fire-station. Yes, you read it right! A fire station. What’s for sure is that we will never be short of water on this project. We love to work on collabs in public spaces. Living in the city, we are short of space to cultivate… we can’t all have allotments, but we are on a mission to transform any bit of urban space we can find into a lovely green hub.

Hedges is something we are going to be talking to you all about in the next few months…they are incredibly important way for us all to green our footprint. More news on this one soon.

Finally, an offer for any Camden residents. Would you like a bare-root tree whip to plant in your garden or in a balcony on a pot. If so, get in touch with thinkanddocamden@gmail.com

Until next time, take care and get greening your footprint. Here’s some actions you can take: