Photo by Andrea Paz on Pexels.com Once there was a woman who could never get green things to grow, no matter how hard she tried. Each spring, she would sow seeds she had gathered in the autumn. Her pockets and bags bulged with little zip-lock plastic bags; the kinds that had once contained screws, sequins, …
My first ever blog post was all about trees. In early 2016 I wrote a list of tree-themed aspirations for the year ahead, including planting a tree, climbing a tree, getting better at identifying trees and learning the names of the trees on my street. It has taken me four years to tick off that …
Continue reading How and why I learnt the names of my street trees during lockdown
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 …
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 …
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 …
We have a thing about planting trees in circles in Tottenham. There’s the iconic Seven Sisters tree circle on Page Green of course, originally made up of seven elms but now comprising seven hornbeams, and then there’s the Millennial Oak Circle on Lordship Recreation Ground. This ring of 12 oaks was planted at the turn …
Little Wild Tales 