New Vernaculars

There was a heat dome over the north. It was in the news about the USA and Canada, but it’s also been in the Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, in the febrile crescent above the Arabian Sea arcing from Oman to Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, during a Zoom call with a colleague in Milan she mentioned it had been 41°C there in the previous week. Temperature records have been broken in British Columbia, Washington, Portland, Moscow, Lappland, Helsinki, Northern Ireland. All this in a ‘cool’ La Niña year.

Around here, folk have been disappointed with the weather. They were finding Summer elusive this year – the Met Office reports that the UK had its coldest May since 1996. The UK mean temperature for June was 1.2°C above the 1981-2010 long-term average though. The maximum temperature in East Anglia was 1.6°C above the 1961 to 1990 averages. It’s been a bit wetter this Summer – but this is still a dry place sat between the two driest weather stations in the UK: Shoeburyness and St Osyth. In the last week we hit 29°C

The climate projections indicate the expected future: hotter, drier.

I recently visited Hilldrop – the experimental garden of John Little and his family. Little’s best known for his business, the Grass Roof Company which has introduced wild landscapes into schools, public spaces and onto roofs. His work is evident across lots of east London and Essex – cultivating plants and insect habitat into the urban niches afforded by bus shelters, cycle storage, bin sheds, social housing estates and on-and-around converted shipping containers, retired intermodal cargo boxes that now house classrooms, visitor centres, home offices and studios.

John Little leading a tour of Hilldrop

In recent years Little has extended his practice through exploring the potentials of waste construction materials as a substrate for planting. These brownfield construction wastes include crushed bathroom ceramics, pulverised glass, sands from the A13 road widening, chalk leftovers from sugar production, brick and rubble from demolitions. Each of these low-nutrient substrates support different plant communities and associated invertebrate populations. “Keep your topsoil for the vegetable garden,” Little remarked, and it reminded me of words attributed to permaculturalist Bill Mollison to the effect that we don’t have to restore all the world’s soils just those necessary for food production*. I don’t like the necromancy of terms like ‘ecosystem services’ but its clear that there are benefits here beyond accounting.

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Beth Chatto’s gravel garden

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Dry garden at RHS Hyde Hall

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The Prospect Cottage re-creation at the Garden Museum

Another of the interesting aspects of Hilldrop is how it represents something of an emergent new horticultural vernacular for Essex – one that is fitting for that hotter, drier future we’re forecast. Hilldrop is thus in resonance with Beth Chatto’s gravel garden in Elmstead Market, the drought garden at RHS Hyde Hall in Rettendon, the Franklin’s riad in Burnham-on-Crouch. There’s also an affinity with Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness – the other southern Deng[i]e (the correspondence between Jarman and Chatto cements the Essex-Kent link).

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Canvey Wick Nature Reserve

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Stambridge Mills, Rochford

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The former Fisons Fertiliser Factory near Stanford-le-Hope

Hilldrop is also kin with spaces beyond the garden – there’s Essex’s ‘rainforest‘: Canvey Wick nature reserve that grows over the infrastructure of an oil refinery never completed, Oliver Road Lagoons where Thurrock Power Station once stood and now a mosaic of wildflower-rich habitats erupts from Pulverised Fuel Ash, the derelict site of Stambridge Mills on the river Roach, and all the edgeland strips about supermarket carparks that employ accidental xeriscaping alongside self-willed volunteers. Focal Point Gallery has done much recently to highlight this relation between re-wilding and refuse, with David Blandy’s The World After and Eloise Hawser’s 800,000 tonnes: Waste Management and Recycling in Essex.

Thames lighter photos by Angenita Teekens.

I also think about the tidal pools that Angenita Teekens discovered in the Thames lighters sunk as wavebreaks off Bradwell-on-Sea, the oyster broodstock being deployed about the offshore wind turbines on Gunfleet Sands, the Peregrine’s roosting on the decommissioned Bradwell Nuclear Power Station. Perhaps there’s a connection here too with the post-nuclear landscapes of Orford Ness and its vegetated shingle – the wild inspiration for Jarman>Chatto’s analogues.

This new Essex vernacular is not only drought-ready, it’s also post-industrial, and it’s built of novel ecologies. The Anthropocene, the hot planet, the SalvagePatch, will require new forms of relationship between us and the rest of the more-than-human world – it will look different in different places, different bioregions – perhaps this is what it will look like here.

* Bill Mollison wrote: ‘It is not the purpose of people on Earth to reduce all soils to perfectly balanced, well-drained, irrigated, and mulched market gardens, although this is achievable and necessary on the 4% of the earth we need for our food production. Thus, what I have to say of soils refers to that 4%, with wider implications only for those soils (60% of all agricultural soils) that we have ruined by the plough or polluted by emissions from cars, sprays, radioactives and industry. – Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, (1988), p.183

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