Today (21st October 2020) is the 30th anniversary of Apple Day and I thought I'd mark the occasion by telling you about two urban orchards close to where I live in North London - one around one hundred years old, the other just ten. Apple Day was founded by Common Ground in 1990 as an …
Reliving the Grand Haringey Fungus Foray - my initiation into the weird and wonderful world of fungi
I have always dreamt of keeping bees. On my good life wish list, it has ranked somewhere alongside tending an orchard, building a treehouse and creating a wildflower meadow for many years. Lately, I have been reading bedtime stories to my children from a book called Tales from the End Cottage, which has rekindled that …
We are lucky to have a lovely little open space at the end of our road. The bigger parks can get too busy for my liking but Brunswick Park is nearly always quiet. During the lockdown we have been there lots and lots. Even while the playground has been closed, we have made our own …
Lesson two: Don’t piss off the locals. I’m talking about the four-legged, bushy-tailed, red-furred, nocturnal, cunning kind. Upon moving in we discovered that a family of urban foxes was using our garden and its neighbouring ones as a ‘suite of rooms’. The south-facing garden with the wide, sunny lawn? The playroom. The overgrown garden full …
It's been a loooooooooooooong time since I last wrote. I’m now mum to two beautiful, delightful and extremely cheeky daughters: Gwendolyn (aged three) and Josephine (aged one) and right now, while on lockdown in our terrace house in Tottenham, London, with their daddy, and our two cats, I’ve decided it’s finally time to dust down …
When you start pushing a pram around London you end up discovering lots of hidden green patches and pockets you never knew were there before. At least, that's what I have done. In the old pre-motherhood days I would stride the quickest route I knew from A to B, from our house to the tube, …
Continue reading Discovering new green spaces and planting trees on them
At The Tree Council we are lucky to have a large collection of excellent books celebrating all aspects of trees. With Christmas just around the corner, I thought I'd let you know what I thought about three very different books to recently join our little library: Trees in Towns and Cities, A History of British …
Dear fellow tree lovers, I'm sorry I've not written in so long; I hope you will understand. It's not that I've grown tired of arboreal adventures; it's just that a certain new little person in my life is making it tricky to find the time to write them down... She's napping now, in the …
My National Tree Week began with an oak circle and ended with a cherry avenue - two kinds of man-made treescape, both intended to change and improve views. (It also involved a spot of 'tree dressing' but I'll tell you more about that later.) The cherry avenue grows amongst an oasis of trees, both mature …
Little Wild Tales 