Climate adaptability in the UK and Middle-East
There is something incredibly exciting about living walls. Stacking green plants on the vertical plane on buildings, where you’d think they just should not be, goes against the odds. Yet nowadays they are almost commonplace, and most people have encountered one somewhere. They cling to life with extraordinary tenacity, usually in a growing medium only
I have been lucky enough to have designed and built a lot of water gardens in my time; I’ve been looking back over some of my pictures, and thought I’d share them here. Working with water is like nothing else; it is enigmatic, frustrating, contrary, exciting and absolutely rewarding in a way that few other
Last winter I did some interesting work in Abu Dhabi, concerning the care of trees. I can’t name one of the projects (a royal palace), but one was Mushrif Central Park undergoing a major redevelopment (and now reopened – March 2015). In both places I undertook a survey of 100+ broadleaf trees (as opposed to palms),
I am working as a consulting arborist in the UAE for a couple of large projects. Whilst there, I have been observing the broad state of the art and there is a long way to go in bringing across current best practice to the Middle-East, and I suspect that is so for many parts of
Here are some pics from my garden; they tell of Nature’s rhythms and how they effect our lives…
This article was written in 2013 and updated in April 2019. I’ve written before on the subject of adaptive landscapes and trans-migrational landscapes but I’ve been reading recently of a real-life ecology that was created by man in the last 150 years, and is thriving. This is on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, a
I’ve got to admit it; plants do something to me. When in their proximity, either indoors or out, things feel different. It could be because they change the air, giving me oxygen, removing pollutants and humidifying the atmosphere. It could be because they give me a subtle but direct contact with Nature. Maybe they talk
This ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) animation does a great job of explaining the need for trees. One minor criticism: the part which shows the trees’ underground root structure shows it way too small; should be at least twice the radius, if not three times. Never mind, worth a watch:
Last year some interesting work emerged over the use of green walls for mitigation of air pollution; in particular the ability (or otherwise) of plants to remove particulate matter from the air, with pm10 being the size range focussed upon. This is the particle size most emitted from diesel exhaust, and this does a lot
I was chatting to the local farm manager the other day, out on the snow-lined track. “There’s nothing in the hedgerows for the birds” he told me. It made me glad that there was in my garden, which borders the track and fields. It also brought home such a startling truth: the birds need us
