What could be greener than gardening? At its most basic, we grow, plant and compost, but we also visit nurseries and garden centres to buy in new plants, invest in new kit and try new technologies, and these visits result in stacks of plastic pots, labels and trays, and bags of un-ethical composts and plants grown in unrealistic conditions that often disappointingly don’t make the transition from pot to garden.
A ring round local nurseries reassured me that most were at least growing their own plants, trying hard to invest in greener products, recycling their pots and eagerly watching ready to snap up the latest eco pots and composts. I realise it’s been a bad year for the industry, the lockdown has curtailed profits and the weather has cutback growth, but it’s up to the behemoths who supply garden centres to really make the change.
A visit to local nursery Edible Culture in Faversham will point them in the right direction. Housed in redundant horticultural glasshouses at Abbey School in Faversham, Christ Williams and David Ware sell locally grown mostly edible plants in plastic pots, but these pots won’t make their way home with you, they’ll be re-used over and over again by the nursery and your plant will be decanted into their own invention: a paper Posipot that will safely get your purchases home and then rot down in the ground.
Peat-free compost can be bought in re-usable bags for life; organic soil additives are sold by weight, and gardening accessories are British-made and plastic free. Chris and David told me, “We took a long hard look at our horticultural practices and decided to switch to plastic-free, to stop using peat and forgo pesticides. The sector has an important role to play in addressing climate change and linking people back to nature and its inherent health benefits. Customers love what we’re doing. It’s not as convenient, but look where convenience has got us.”
Strong opinions that often disagree with established thinking, but the nursery doesn’t wear its green credentials like a hairshirt: there’s plenty to be joyous about in seasonality and the natural world. What can we do to hurry the industry into recognising the problem and working speedily to a solution? Make sure you ask for greener products and return pots to nurseries: it’s up to gardeners to bring about the changes.
Photos by Sarah Cuttle. This piece is from a longer article in The Telegraph, and others in the RHS Garden Magazine and Simple Things. Visit www.edibleculture.co.uk.