According to Paul Wood, in a book I must get round to reading, London is a Forest. It's often quite hard to credit this - today, for example, on the top of a bus circumnavigating Elephant and Castle, it wasn't easy to see how something as vital and squishy as human beings manage to live here, let alone foxes and hoverflies and eight million (apparently) trees.
If you did want convincing though you could do a lot worse than get a weekend pass for London Open Garden Squares Weekend, which is usually held about mid June, and stroll from green space to green space around Bloomsbury or Kensington.
This time though we started at Charing Cross and the roof of the Coutts building (access was via ballot, as numbers are restricted). This is a container garden, including fruit and flowers, which runs around the top floor. It's an impressively thriving garden - I saw ladybird larvae - the sort where you know if you picked a tomato it would taste really good and not all watery like shop bought ones sometimes do, but it's more remarkable for it's location than the garden itself. As our guide pointed out, you could do this on lots of buildings - why don't we?
St Martins from the top of Coutts
I don't seem to have taken any more photos on the Saturday. I don't know why. We went to Waterloo Gardens and the Phoenix Garden and Bedford and Montague Squares, walked through Woburn Square Garden and Gordon Square (both of which I think are normally open anyway) and round Park Square off Regents Park - which has a tunnel connecting the two halves called 'Nursemaids' Tunnel' as it was built so that those with children could go under the busy road rather than have to attempt to cross it - and up to the Garden at the Royal College of Physicians. What most of these were remarkable for was my having vaguely registered some of them as locked gates or hedges behind cast iron railings without appreciating their size or tallying them up as green space.
Somehow this lots-of-little-gardens knowledge feels like it adds up to more greenery than the vast swathes of the Royal Parks I'm already aware of. Perhaps not in acreage, but there's an intimacy to them - often it's usually only residents who have access - and a frequency as well, especially if you do as we did and visited them on the basis of proximity rather than any set plan.
Sunday I was by myself so first went to the Royal Hospital for Neuro Disability, which is relatively close to me in Putney. Apparently the grounds were originally laid out by Capability Brown, but understandably the hospital has other priorities and there's a lot of modern buildings you have to try and filter out to get a flavour of what it must once have been like. There are also sensory gardens, and a terrace with roses, but it all feels a little incoherent. Nothing pulls it together as one garden.
On the other hand it definitely is a very pleasant space for staff, patients and family to sit and eat lunch or wander while talking.
The lemon sponge cake was divine as well.
Then I went into Kensington. First to Earls Court Square, then Barkston Gardens.
Then after that (passing Bramham Gardens, which were not open - some gardens are only open one day of the weekend, some don't participate, I think it depends on whether they can get volunteers) I went to Courtfield Gardens, which is a Garden of two halves - West and East.
After that I went to Collingham Gardens, which is particularly charming because the residential buildings around it aren't the other side of the road as with most of these London Squares but back onto it and have steps straight in.
All these have large grassy areas by the way, and two have children's parks with swings and things. Some have deckchairs. They're proper places for residents to play and rest. That said, it's not quite like a private garden. There are regulations about vacating at dusk or where you can play ball games or how many people you can bring in from outside. I don't know if the residents do some of the gardening - generally the Kensington ones seemed far too well groomed for that to be the case, whereas with the Phoenix Garden the fact it's volunteers and reclaimed materials is clearly the point.
Next year, assuming it's running, I'd like to focus on Westminster and the City - although I suspect it will be slimmer pickings there.
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