Shouting from my shed

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Fake Plastic Trees

 

[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]



“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this…. The joy which Nature yields is like [that] afforded by the frank words of one we love.” – Thoreau (Journal, January 3, 1853)

One of the bleakest weeks of the year. Barely eight hours of daylight where I live. The sun creeping low across the sky. A roaring in the wind all night; the rain came heavily and fell in floods.

On top of all this, the first week of the new year sees the country thrust back into lockdown once again. The mountains may be calling, but they feel further away than ever. I have never spent so much time away from wild places.

With all this in mind, I made my way to what looked to be one of the most nature-depleted grid squares on my map. Zero need for the colour green; the main colour coming from two busy yellow roads; just four scraps of footpath, barely a couple of hundred metres in total, all cracked tarmac strewn with broken glass; the entire grid covered in buildings. In more need than ever of nature’s gladness, what would I find? Was I to lose all hope?

I explored by bike today because previous lockdown adventures have taught me that covering every street in a built-up area involves high mileage.

On the first terraced street I pedalled down a dog barked incessantly, pressed up against the downstairs window. I empathised and sympathised. One house had replaced the small front lawn with artificial grass. Many had gone the whole way and concreted their entire gardens, maximising ease of maintenance and space to park cars. It’s neat, easy – and a staggering £2bn global market. But as plastic grass takes over our cities, some say that it’s green only in colour.

With products named after beautiful places – Lake District, Valencia – modern artificial turf mimics not just the mottled colouring and shape of grass blades, but the warm springiness of earth.

Unlike the grass itself, the market is growing. Dozens of specialist firms now market fake grass as a replacement for garden lawns. UK sales surged during last year’s record summer temperatures.

Paul Hetherington, fundraising director for the charity Buglife, says artificial turf is far from an eco-friendly alternative to natural grass. “It blocks access to the soil beneath for burrowing insects, such as solitary bees, and the ground above for soil dwellers such as worms, which will be starved of food beneath it,” he says. “It provides food for absolutely no living creatures.”

This is a particular concern in view of the dramatic global decline in insect species. The UK is on course to miss its own targets for protecting its natural spaces, and has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows in a single generation.

The root of the problem is social pressure for a perfect green lawn. “In the mindset of the British public you haven’t really got a garden unless you’ve got a lawn.” But “There are better solutions that would give people more pleasure than just looking out at this sheet of slowly degrading plastic.”

He suggests planting shady front gardens with tolerant shrubs, such as evergreen bushes: these provide greenery all year round, need little maintenance, suppress weeds, offer food for wildlife and places for birds to nest, and give hedgehogs and frogs cover to travel safely in urban streets. “After all, we are supposed to be a nation of gardeners.”

To Trevor Dines, botanical specialist for charity Plantlife, the popularity of artificial grass shows how disconnected we have become from the natural world. “Whenever I see artificial grass my heart sinks – more nature smothered by more plastic. Where once we were famed for our lawns, we now opt for artificial, low-maintenance solutions.

“This is not just to the detriment of wildlife but to us, too; children can’t make a daisy-chain on a plastic lawn.”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” said Dr Zeuss in The Lorax. I passed a stout tree, chopped down at waist height. Fortunately, just as I was beginning to fear I had stumbled onto the Street of the Lifted Lorax, my eye was drawn by a lush green hedge, bursting with yellow and orange berries: firethorn (I learned from my Seek app). The owner saw me photographing the hedge.

“The birds love it too,” he said. “It’s fantastic. I planted it to get rid of the kids that used to sit all along my wall, like birds on a telegraph wire. Shouting, dropping sweet wrappers. I like that hedge.”

That hedge opened my eyes to all the little gardens I rode past as I pedalled up and down the cul de sacs and round the estates. Certainly a fair number had made efforts to remove all trace of the natural world from their properties. But most of the front gardens did have some grass or plants, bushes or trees in them. Now that I was noticing them it was apparent just how significant each of our gardens add up to being in our desperate, rearguard defence of nature.

Together, the UK’s gardens are larger than all of our National Nature Reserves combined, making them as important for wildlife as they are for our own wellbeing. These green spaces are a lifeline for wildlife, little havens scattered through the desert of urban sprawl and intensively managed farmland. Trees and shrubs shelter miniature mammals and nesting birds, whilst feeders offer a reliable food source no matter how wild the weather is. Even a single window-ledge plant pot can make a difference, providing pollen and nectar for insects straying into the concrete jungle. 

I searched for nature throughout my ride. I found noisy starlings and a couple of seagulls; a fox’s path pushing beneath a fence; clusters of the weed called Annual Mercury, also known as ‘Girl’s Mercury’ and ‘Boy’s Mercury’. According to Pliny, the plant could be used by a pregnant mother to select the sex of her child. The plant is also eaten, boiled, in Germany – it is said to taste a little like spinach, but as it is poisonous, I would be inclined to give it a miss. Also, in France the plant is known as Mercuriale ou la Foirolle, with ‘la Foire’ meaning diarrhoea. You have been warned.  Even here, in the depths of winter, plants were everywhere, ready to let rip if we just leave them be. It was not a fancy area at all, and the gardens, where they existed at all, were small. But nonetheless nature is ready, willing, and waiting for the chance to return.

I sympathised with the astroturf lawns for I have zero inclination to mow a lawn or tend a garden myself. But my study of this grid square led me to favour those homes whose front garden boasted a tree or a few bushes, leaving –of course– enough space for a couple of chairs and a summer evening’s barbecue. Negligible maintenance, cheaper than tarmac, and better for the soul. The saddest sight I saw was one garden brimming with green bushes, a large tree, and ivy arching round the front door, and its immediate neighbour whose concrete front garden was bereft of even a single weed. The two colourful hanging baskets framing the front door were filled with fake plastic flowers.

As I pedalled I mused that one of the main causes of all these problems is cars. Most homes had two cars parked in front of them. Every residential road was also lined with parked cars. Getting rid of cars might sound radical, and unsympathetic to people’s working lives. But our car dependency is a new phenomenon, and our assumption that it is normal is another case of shifting baseline syndrome. One hundred years ago streets were not jammed with cars and gardens (I’m guessing) were covered with vegetable patches not fake plastic grass. So I found myself oddly hopeful as I imagined this brief blip of a few decades where every adult ‘needed’ a car fading away to a new era of self-driving electric cars.

Typically, the average household tends to have two vehicles with each car only used approximately 5% of the time and is parked the other 95%. An unmanned car can be utilised much more. In addition, a driverless car isn’t needed at a fixed location during working hours. It can drive you to your work, and take family members to another location. If you opt into a car share scheme with others travelling on the same route as you, the cost of commuting could also be slashed significantly.

With the natural reduction in cars per household that this could incur, our green space could increase and allow for more facilities such as hospitals, schools and homes to be built.

Our living spaces will see a transformation as part of a driverless revolution. There will be a reduced need for drives and garages because of the potential reduction of car ownership. The changes to street planning, therefore, could be huge; property development may be rethought, causing housing layouts to be altered, and even pavements to be widened because of a lesser need for street parking.

I smiled to myself because I always like it when I talk myself into a more positive frame of mind. Hungry now, I looked for somewhere to buy a snack. With this grid square being entirely residential I knew that I’d find a parade of local shops and convenience stores within a couple of blocks. In fact, I found several of these parades. (I chose to not dwell on the car parking congestion at each one and the total absence of bicycle racks, despite these shops specifically targeting local residents…)

I’m really interested in food these days, as it has such a massive, direct impact on two things I care deeply about: the environment and physical fitness and activity. Here are the array of shops available at each parade in today’s grid square:

  1. Tesco Express, KFC, Ladbrokes bookmakers, Kebab/burger grill takeaway, dry cleaner, cafe (closed), hair salon, bakery, fish and chips takeaway, Off license, post office, pharmacy.
  2. A pub, a cafe (both closed), Chinese takeaway, barbers, sewing shop, fish and chips takeaway, corner shop.
  3. Mini Market, Off license.
  4. Tesco Express (with Costa coffee), a Kitchen, Bedroom and Bathrooms outfitter, Chinese takeaway, Indian takeaway, Off licence and butcher (“used mobile phones and laptops for sale”), Costcutter convenience store.

With the exception of the two Tescos, there were virtually zero fruit or vegetables for sale. One of the convenience stores had, amongst the aisles of crisps and biscuits, only a single expensive lettuce, two cucumbers, one sweating broccoli, and a few onions, bananas, satsumas and grapes. In contrast to the excessive availability of unhealthy takeaway food and booze, the area felt like a fresh food desert. It’s a sad twist of craziness when our society is being harmed simultaneously by too many cars and consumption and poverty levels that lead to food deserts [report].

More than a million people in the UK live in “food deserts” – neighbourhoods where poverty, poor public transport and a dearth of big supermarkets severely limit access to affordable fresh fruit and vegetables, a study has claimed.

Nearly one in 10 of the country’s most economically deprived areas are food deserts, it says – typically large out-of-town housing estates and deprived inner-city wards served by a handful of small, relatively expensive corner shops.

Public health experts are concerned that these neighbourhoods – which are often also “food swamps” with high densities of fast-food outlets – are helping to fuel a rise in diet-related conditions such as obesity and diabetes, as well as driving food insecurity. 

A survey carried out as part of the study found that nearly a third of respondents reported that lack of money was the biggest barrier to eating healthily (29%), followed by lack of time to cook (22%). Some 18% said they did not know how to cook healthy meals.

I’m sorry that today’s grid square is pouring forth such doom and gloom. I actually was very happy cycling around in the crisp January sunshine. As the t-shirt says, “you can’t buy happiness but you can buy a bike, and that’s pretty close.” It was a pity then that I didn’t see a single kid out riding their bikes, and the only adults I saw were a surprisingly large number of fast-food cycle couriers with enormous ‘Just Eat’ or ‘Deliveroo’ bags on their bags. Sadly, one of the closed down shops I saw today was a failed bike shop.

But I’ll resist going off on another rant and tell you about the closed down public toilet that was literally disappearing beneath a shaggy mane of ivy. Urban rewilding makes me happy (unless I need the loo)!

Pleasing also was an ornately carved granite drinking fountain and water trough, built by Anne Maria Gibbons in 1903 ‘for the benefit of horses and dogs’ in memory of her husband. These days it is marooned on an island in the middle of a busy roundabout, but I liked the sentiment.

Approaching the end of today’s square I noticed that someone had left an old toaster out on their garden wall, offering it up to a new home. I liked the sentiment, and I really like toast. The word ‘toast’ comes from the Latin ‘torrere’ meaning ‘to burn’. The first reference to toast in print is in a recipe for Oyle Soppys (flavoured onions stewed in a gallon of stale beer and a pint of oil) from 1430. In the 1400s and 1500s, toast was discarded or eaten after it was used as a flavoring for drinks. In the 1600s, toast was still thought of as something to be put into drinks. In his 1602 play The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare gives Falstaff the line: “Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in’t.” 

It was time for me to head home and put the kettle on.

 

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Comments

  1. Another interesting read. Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share. It is a shame how nature is being slowly (or maybe not so slowly) strangled. Looking forward to your next grid square.

    Reply
  2. Rob Posted

    A haiku for you:

    An astroturf lawn
    it’s not all doom and gloom though
    or is it, oh shit

    Reply

 
 

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Shouting from my shed

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