You can’t have missed the recent resurgence of the humble allotment in the gardening and mainstream media. Growing your own never went out of practice in England, but it certainly hasn’t been fashionable. Until recently the idea of allotments and vegetable patches conjured images of middle-class leisure and eccentricity – it wasn’t exactly necessary and seemed an extraordinary amount of work for relatively little yield. But with the recent economic downturn it appears that growing your own is experiencing a real comeback, not least because of it’s vintage appeal.

Like ‘make do and mend’ and second-hand chic, ‘Victory gardening’ is the latest way to relive the (imagined) good old days. Hence the saturation of the market (both gardening and mainstream) with cutely packaged grow-your-own novelty kits, retro-style garden tools and book after book of step-by-step home allotment guides. The idea is to save money and increase self-sufficiency by growing your own fruit and vegetables instead of paying over the odds for supermarket stock.

My concern is that when the economy starts to pick up and people are no longer driven by an economic imperative, companies like the brilliant Rocket Gardens (images above) will lose custom. Yet there is hope for the longevity of the allotment, due primarily to the sustainability issue. A quick scan of the fruit and vegetable aisles of the average supermarket reveals that most products are imported from far-away places; herbs from Israel, berries from Chile, oranges from Spain. An increasing number of people don’t want that many air miles attached to their five-a-day. So this is where urban agriculture comes in: that is, a sustained and permanent effort to grow, process and distribute agricultural produce in urban environments and to incorporate agriculture into urban planning.

It has been successful around the world, most famously in Cuba where gardeners can use allocated state land at no cost to produce food for themslves and their families (image above). This was begun out of necessity, since the USA banned imports to Cuba in the 1960s and food scarcity was a najor issue. But we shouldn’t wait until we are faced with a similar crisis in self-sufficiency before we start to produce our own food. It seems that the UK is finally catching on, as the National Trust has just launched their plan to set up ‘super allotments’ for the use of local families in locations around England (read story at the Telegraph. Admittedly this ‘Community Supported Agriculture’ won’t necessarily be based in urban centres, against the backdrop of high rises and main roads as it is in Havana, but it is a step in the right direction. And if the futurists are right, as the Guardian recently reported, the next ten years will see a rise in the number of skilled agricultural workers and entrepreneurs as the demand for fresh, organic and locally-sourced food increases.

So what about the supermarkets, those monolithic beacons of unsustainability with their high energy costs, hard landscaping and high importation quotas? Birmingham-based architect Joe Holyoak wrote an interesting article about this very topic recently, and suggested that supermarkets could partly offset their negative environmental impact and fulfil growing demand for localisation by planting rooftop gardens complete with vegetable patches and free-range chicken farms. He also mentions the efficiency of vertical gardens, which can often pack a lot more produce into a smaller surface area. Cafes and restaurants could also use this model, utilising their roofs for urban food production. It would mean a greater committment to eating locally and seasonally, but this seems like a small price to pay for food security in the future.
For more information and resources about urban agriculture visit Sustain Web; Research Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security; Urban Farming.

When we were children my mom always got daffodils for mother’s day. One year, when my brother was about eight, he went out and bought a bunch of pretty red tulips, thinking they were the daffodils mom liked so much. She didn’t have the heart to correct him, and we often bought her ‘daffodils’ for mothers day in subsequent years.

Those were the plain red tulips with a black base that are so maligned throughout the history of tulip cultivation. Much preferred in its countries of origin, Pavord informs us, were the ‘broken’ varieties; petals flamed and feathered with constrasting colours, the more defined the better, and a gently waisted form. In Turkey a single flower was exhibited in a bulbous traditional vase, for the admiration of all.

In England the fashion for tulips, which were arriving in the early seventeenth century, was for a more spherical, half-cup shaped flower. Tulips lend themselves well to formality, with their neat symmetry and glossy, firm petals, and they were usually found in formal cutting gardens and borders, each variety occupying one section of a grid. They were a much-coveted flower, the passion of the newly emerging florist, and the seven-year wait for seedlings to mature was anticipated eagerly by those who could not afford to buy the bulbs outright. Varieties were seemingly endless, and the unpredictable nature of each individual bulb only added to its mystique and desirability.

Of course flowers, like any other consumer product, are subject to the whims of fashion and the craze for tulips was gradually superseded by the prominence of more exotic, rare flowers. Yet Pavord’s book is a lively account of how the history of plants and flowers is a socio-economic and cultural story as much as the story of a flower. The tulips growing in our gardens or available at florists did not appear there by chance – they are the end result of a few hundred years of travel, trade, fashion, experimentation and enthusiastic cultivation. It is a fascinating and rewarding read.