A visitor takes a photo of the flowers of the ‘Superbloom’ garden in the moat of the Tower of London, in London (Dominic Lipinski/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)There is a street in Finchley that I visit often. It has 18 houses, and enough room for each household to park a car on the street. But each house has gutted its front garden, torn up its trees and dropped its kerbs. Now almost no one can park on the street because, if they do, they will block their parking spaces, and this seems to me the very definition of insanity. Plants, if they still exist, wobble in corners, choking.
Lack of foresight has made London near uninhabitable during heatwaves, and prone to flooding in rainstorms — in future, we will have more of both. We need gardens to lower the temperature, to absorb excess water, to support biodiversity, and for our sanity: we are supposed to live under trees and near water, not under tower blocks near tarmac.
The right kind of tree cover can lower temperatures by 10 degrees Fahrenheit in cities, as anyone who has ever sat under a tree will know. There is a reason our earthly paradise was the garden of Eden. In myth, God cast us out; in reality, we cast ourselves out, and we cannot stop.
London is, due to its string of parks from Hampstead Heath to Kensington, one of the greenest great cities in the world. You can usually find a tree to sit under, especially if you are rich and mobile.
I was in Taunton yesterday in 90-degree heat, and the cult of the car and the out-of-town supermarket and the ring road has turned a once beautiful county town into a version of hell. There isn’t a town planner since the war I don’t want to scream at: what have you done? What have developers, who hate trees — subsidence — done? What have transport planners done, except herd people into cars, and let rural public transport either wither — no one trusts a rural bus to get them anywhere on time — or become so expensive that only tourists use it? Always cars and yet more cars; why do we take it?
And so, London is becoming less green each year. People tear out their front gardens and either deck over or put Astroturf at the back, because an hour of gardening is too much trouble. It shouldn’t be: when we moved into our home my husband planted our garden. It is filled with roses and sweet peas and cherry trees and an echium that grew as tall as the house and attracted a colony of bees. This garden is small and shady, and it is a sacred place.
There is no individual solution to the climate crisis, of course, but you may be able to do this. Look at the sun, if you can bear to. Replant your garden.
