Barley Biswas and her son, Oisin on the Smalley Estate, Stoke Newington

As I wander in no-one stops me. The garden is a corner plot behind the Geffrye Museum. The entrance is stacked with plants for sale, behind is a small area of woodland, a stand of birch all glossy green in May.

I follow a path past a pond and an old bathtub planted with bulbs. An open area leads on to a large greenhouse near raised vegetable beds and an orchard.

To the side, through a pergola draped with clematis are beds filled with tulips lolling in the sun. The garden is alive with insects and birds that flit from bed to bush. There is a lovely openness about the place.

I sit at a table and talk to Ita, one of the volunteers. “Thursday is my best day of the week,” she says, “the day I come gardening”.

Over at the garden office Claudia Sartori tells me that the garden stands on the site of bombed terraces, demolished after the war and replaced with prefabs.

People moved out as the neighbouring Fellowes Court was completed, but there’s still a lamppost from the prefab days. It was a council depot, a play area; then local residents raised funds for a communal garden, owned by an organisation that ran horticultural therapy courses.

In all that Claudia tells me – the after-school club with the local school, the gardening courses for estate residents, for older people in sheltered accommodation – it is this that at first I dully don’t understand.

Working with people who have mental health problems, people with strokes, with dementia – a nice day out for them I wonder, nothing more. What do they do in the winter? “We bag up seeds”.

She retrieves a box from a corner of the room in which are laid small pay packets, each carefully labelled and stuck. As she cups the seed in her palm, folds the packet, tidies the envelopes, I suddenly get it.

For anyone relearning motor skills this is tricky, intricate, just-hard-enough work. “We have people that can barely see that do pruning.” Isn’t that a little risky?

“It’s most complicated if the person has learning difficulties, you break the task down into small sections, or you make it more obvious. If they’re weeding, you tie the non-weeds with a piece of tape and ask them to clear everything else.”

While we’re talking a woman comes in and asks for vegetables. Claudia fishes out a bag. So she can pick her own? “Oh yes, locals can come in and pay to get their veg.” It is a mixed sort of gardening here, there are lettuces in the annuals bed.

They run courses for garden design for people in flats. “There are people who say ‘I have only a balcony’, so we teach them about gardening in different aspects, colours, screening from the wind”.

I think how different this garden is to the private plots of traditional gardeners, who obsess over texture, form and their perennial border. Here the garden is a centre for people, a green space put to a myriad of different uses, and the links replicate.

Until 13 June, the garden is a drop-off point for broken tools, which are then refurbished in prisons and passed on to schools with gardening projects.

I ask Claudia what she needs more of. Like the garden, she is soft, measured, but very focused. They have enough volunteers to do the gardening, though more are welcome. They’d like help with admin, fundraising, publicity, from anyone with woodworking skills, wood to repair the raised beds, waterbutts, even a digital camera and photocopier. Oh, and a display board for the entrance if anyone has one.

Camilla Baker, now a regular volunteer went on the St Mary’s course for estate residents. She took what she learned back to the Wilton Estate and has now planted bluebells, a cotoneaster, daffodils, but fears that when the maintenance come round, what she has planted, like the lavender which undergoes a twice-yearly haircut, will all be cut down to the same size.

So if you live on an estate, how do you negotiate your space with the Council?

Over on the Rhodes Estate, south of Dalston Lane, resident Michael Calderbank has been gardening with others on the public land for just over a year.

The tenants’ and residents’ association (TRA) had carried out a survey to find out what people wanted and raised their plan to start community gardening with the Council. Michael researched the history of the land with Hackney Archives to check the plot was not contaminated.

The Council also visited the plot to ensure no underground services were present and have now accepted the gardeners’ alternative use of the land. Estate maintenance just leave the patch alone.

Groundwork East London provided a grant for start-up costs and fruits trees, which are now complemented by herbs, a grape vine, and veg such as kai choi, cavalo nero and swiss chard.

The gardeners also keep many of the ‘weeds’ that grow in order to support wildlife. They are in the process of learning which of them – such as dandelion and mallow – are edible. Michael also tells me about the green space on Napier Grove in south Hackney funded by Shoreditch Trust, and managed by Grass Shoots.

When I cycle down there the local kids hang off the fencing around the plot pointing out the beds of glossy lettuces. Michael says much of the support on his estate comes from kids who have helped from the start, and from a pensioner who loads up an old pushchair with water containers for the garden.

On the Smalley Estate in Stoke Newington, Barley Biswas has seen her team of child gardeners grow up. First they helped with the gardening, then they took up football.

Now they are fully grown and Barley, along with her tenants’ and residents’ association, got a Small Projects Grant from the Council to plant the space with fruit trees (cherry, plum, pear and apple), plant a circular bed and plants for the playground.

Hedging along the busy Brooke Road was planted by the tenants’ and residents’ association and Groundwork – with help, Barley thinks, from the Tree Musketeers.

Barley replanted an ailing rosebed with lavender, rosemary, poppies and iris. There are now young hollyhock plants at the edges and a willow arch in the centre. The grant also paid for planters; raised off the ground these won’t get fouled by the estate’s dogs. Concerned about food security and energy used in transporting food, Barley is now keen to turn some of the land over to growing veg.

She leads me off to a wooden door, behind it is the small garden of a house the residents use for their meetings. Here she has wooden drawers from an old chest laid out on the ground. They are lined with plastic and filled with soil, growing inside are the veg seedlings that she plans to hand out to the other residents.

The communal space on the estate is underused by adults, she says, but is a local focus for kids, who also come from the neighbouring terraces where there is no open space.

In front of Barley’s block the surround of the play area has been planted up by St Mary’s. There is wisteria and jasmine to cover the fencing at the back, clematis along the road, a new mimosa tree and nodding lilac.

An older Turkish resident from a neighbouring block has propagated a number of walnut trees, which are growing around the play area. Finally Barley takes me to the neighbouring lawn across which TRA treasurer Mary Laughlin has started another small orchard.

We pass around the lawn to the corner of the estate where a plaque commemorates the life of Etem Celebi. The boxes around have been replanted and a circular bench surrounds a newly planted tree.

A week later I cycle slowly back past the estate and am struck how its hedges and trees form a green link between the open common to the east and the woodland of Abney Park in the west.

For further information including events, visit St Mary’s Secret Garden.

If you are gardening on your estate, or anywhere else in Hackney, and would like to have your garden featured, please email peter.jones@hackneycitizen.co.uk

Bob Little, John Little, Ross Henderson, Ben Asmah and Ian Miles from Network Rail’s maintenance team

Local community group, Friends of Homerton Station, is introducing wildflower meadows to the station, with the help of Network Rail’s maintenance team and the Grass Roof Company.

This week they started clearing existing vegetation and litter from the embankments. Over the summer, work will continue to remove rank grasses and invasive plants. Clearance work is necessary in order to create an environment where wildlife-friendly plants can thrive.

Network Rail’s Maintenance Protection Coordinator, Lee Draper, said: ‘Network Rail’s maintenance team is delighted to be involved with this innovative project. We look forward to seeing snowdrops, primroses, foxgloves, buttercups and a variety of other wildflowers at the station.’

‘Wildflower meadows provide a welcoming habitat for butterflies, bees and other wildlife’, says John Little of the Grass Roof Company. ‘Wildflowers will enhance the station and support local biodiversity.’

Friends of Homerton Station was formed in March 2008 to enhance Homerton Station through creation of a wildflower meadow. It is a totally voluntary group. The ‘Friends’ work closely with train operator London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL), Transport for London and with Network Rail.

If you would like to receive the Friends of Homerton Station email newsletter please contact susanna_phillip (at) hotmail.co.uk

Bluebells tossing out the aquilegia

IT started with the seed catalogues. They were bothering me with multiple copies on a weekly basis, all of them garish and none of them much use.

There was something bizarre about the plants they offered, blue fuchsias and blue busy lizzies, a freakish parade of flowers that you know are wrong, red rudbeckias, echinaceas in “every colour imaginable”, a six-foot petunia, or one that flowers in different colours on the same stem – like a human being with two heads.

I picked out some reasonably normal looking poppies and a packet of flax, but searched in vain for anything that hadn’t been “improved”. I felt like a slightly health-obsessed vegan, scouring the kebab shops of the Kingsland Road for succour. It was like doing something you didn’t have to do.

Why would you want something “selected for uniformity and simultaneous flowering”? It’s the very opposite of why you garden. The garden is the one place where you get something genuinely unexpected, magical.
There’s nothing more wonderful than when a plant you had forgotten pokes through, or a seed you had given up on suddenly sprouts. To introduce uniformity, reliability even, is to miss the point entirely.

Bedding plants are fine when they’re done with a huge helping of irony, or in, say, Bournemouth, but in any normal garden they scream where they should sing.

The second thing was the aquilegia. I had planted it too close to some rather thuggish Spanish bluebells, which not being native had smothered it the previous spring. It limped through the summer, sending out a few leaves and had just about got through the cold snap when one morning I walked out to find it lifted clear of the soil.

Beneath its rapidly desiccating rootball was a large clump of bluebells arrived from some other, subterranean place, their stalks still yellow from the dark.

So as an antidote to all this bullying, colorific and otherwise I’ve decided to tone down the palette and go native. I’ve replaced the indigestible mix of “tutti frutti”, “raspberry sorbet” and “chocamocha” with selfheal (Prunella vulgaris), yellow toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) and clustered bellflower (Campanula glomerata).

I am not assured of success, but at least there will be a totally natural palette, a few failures and random flowering.

I am waiting for winter. The plants don’t believe it’s here yet, and though they’re reluctant to flower, they put on new leaves.

So there is the dilemma: to ditch the perennials and replant with bulbs, cyclamen, wallflowers, the wintry stuff, to edge with garish polyanthus – or to love the gradual decline.

As their leaves fall, the loftiest stems and canes look gaunt and fragile. Clumps of greenery denude to a naked skeleton of stems spun with dewy spiders’ webs.

Foliage turns mushy, but the buds are hard, close against the stems. The earth comes into its own, everything returns, energy dripping into it like a sump.

I wake up and there is a nip in the air, the wormery is full. It is time to act. From the wormery I take the middle tray, empty out the new soil, soft and fibrous like fruitcake, sweet-smelling, cold and wet.

In the bottom tray is a rich, muddy slop, pure wormcasts that you can only wipe out with your fingers, brown guano, brown gold. There are stray worms in it that have fallen through.

I buy bulbs at the flower market, cheap brown bags full. crackling, rustling and dry.

The wallflowers come bare rooted and have to be soaked in the sink. They are brittle and dirty with light brown clay, but they revive in cold water. Like cabbages, they grow stealthily throughout the winter, some natural anti-freeze protecting them from the cold.

The plant thieves seem to have gone, but everything I plant has a dun-coloured disguise. I paste the worm slop around the roots, push back the soil and cover with a light eiderdown of leaves.

The brown perennials’ stems are like flak towers, fuzzing the definition, sending the gaze astray. Bulbs find their own depth, but I dirty their nut-coloured paper skins, pushing them into the filthy earth.

Brown gold, they are buried treasure. Their hope is as hard and pungent as onions.

Gone to seed

Around this time of year everything starts going to seed. In the boxes out front the kniphofia lifts a long, dry spike of seeds over the road. The stocks from the summer and the wallflowers that I left in from the spring to give cover have formed almost identical long fingers of crackling brown (they are both members of the Brassica family), each of them filled with tiny black and brown seed. The lovely purple pincushions of scabious flowers that fed the bees all summer have matured into lightweight brown husks, held out on long stems, looking like nothing so much as an old man’s hairy testicles.

In midsummer when the local girls nagged me for things to plant, I told them to pull the seedheads off the marigolds. They pushed them into the wet soil, so that a month ago green shoots sprouted round the edge of the boxes, and now the marigolds are the only new thing, bright orange and yellow, lovely ordinary flowers.

The squirrels (or jays?) have planted oaks in the boxes, which I water like the rest, but Hackney is most lucky with its foreign refugees, the garden escapees like Buddleia davidii (from China) that grows out of the rail embankments and the walls of the canal. The long, purple spikes have mostly turned brown now, spilling their seed onto the very edge of the canal, itself already ragged with mallow and sycamore seedlings – sycamore, that (Mediterranean) non-native which colonises every deserted garden in the borough along with the native elder. On the north side of London Fields those other Mediterraneans, the horse chestnuts shed their shiny brown conkers onto the road, seeds looking for the safety of wet, autumnal earth.

To the east, out on the marshes another garden escapee is now abundant, mixed in with the arching stems of bramble, the red berries of the hawthorn and the scarlet rose hips: drifts of Michaelmas daisies froth about, promiscuously hybridising into a hundred shades of white and mauve, providing late nectar for the bees before their heads explode in clouds of downy seed, to begin again.

This one wild spot on the borough’s eastern edge makes me imagine all the millennia of seeds beneath Hackney streets, makes me want to peel back the concrete, unlay the paving slabs. Beneath the pavement, the beach; beneath our feet, the forest.

Dalston’s box junction

I’d been visiting the guerrilla gardening website, dreaming of planting up the duller bits of Dalston. It then occurred to me that there were two neglected troughs nearby that I could cultivate. They sit on a small traffic island opposite my house, divided in two by a cycle lane.

Apart from a few bulbs in spring, for most of the year they were full of dry weeds. I set out one afternoon with black sack and rubber gloves, took out the cans, the large battery, the crisp packets, the used condoms, the miniature gin bottles, the sack of American coins, and began planting.

Being in the middle of the road, the boxes get far more light than the average garden. Most things grow at twice the rate, but suffer in the summer drought. Each box gets a mulch from the wormery a couple of times a year, but my watering is sporadic.

The dryness favours grey foliage plants – lavender and pinks have thrived. Nasturtiums swell up in rain, when they threaten to smother everything else. The tough American prairie daises, echinacea and rudbeckia give a long, impressive finale to the year. I’m currently trying out blues and purples in one box (echinacea, salvias, scabious, thyme, verbena bonariensis) and yellows, whites and pinks (aquilegia, ox-eye daisies, stocks, verbascum) in the other, turning to scarlets (crocosmia, geum, khinopfia) as the year progresses.

Some thefts have been heartbreaking, a spreading pink the size of a football made it through the damp winter and into flower before being stolen, and cruelly, the only crocosmia to flower was pulled and then discarded in the middle of the road. God knows what these lunatics do with the loot – give them to their mothers? Plant them in their own sad patch? The first couple of times I wanted to put up a sign, or write in chalk on the boxes DO NOT STEAL, but putting up signs seems a bit sour.

Instead I now grow from seed and smother new plantings with soil and leaves. Anything bought new I split into parts to give the safety of numbers. That said, I haven’t been able to resist planting a white pom-pom dahlia and a couple of red hot pokers in memory of my 70s childhood.

Is my foray into public gardening really guerrilla gardening? I suppose may be, although I’ve no links with the group – I simply wanted more space to grow things. Someone asked me who owned the boxes. The answer is I really don’t know – all I can suggest is that it’s a very absent landlord. The gardening has got me talking to neighbours I’d never previously spoken to – one told me that when something comes into flower it makes her day, and it certainly does mine too.