The City Gardener

May is, by a long chalk, my favourite month. After the cool days of March, and April's particular 'but you'll still need a jumper' brand of warmth, May comes a-rollicking, bringing sunshine and lush verdant growth. The city comes to life with the sights and scents of summer: shop planters hang with geraniums and ivy, deciduous street trees again give dappled shade, and the world seems a little brighter, a little kinder. And yet, while temperatures soared, the country was plunged into winter on Monday night following the devastating bombing here in Manchester. Words can't express the feeling in the city. And yet, despite everything, the week has seen people come together, holding vigils, offering free hugs - and laying a carpet of flowers stretching across St Ann's Square, their beauty and heady scent helping heal the city. While the city heals, summer continues apace. The tentative seedlings of spring become established, and for me, the wind...

As far as landscapes go, the city has an unusual terrain. On the horizontal, there are vast man-made plains - roads and pavements, car parks, and paved public spaces. Perpendicular, rising densely from the savannah, are great table-rock edifices - from town houses, to blocks of flats, to skyscrapers. With its human-scale infrastructure, the city is a great place to be for, well, a human.  However, when you put yourself in the shoes of a plant, the chic modern city isn't the kind of place you'd naturally hang out. It's not just high levels of pollution and the likelihood of being trampled; the very fabric of the urban jungle - glass, concrete, tarmac, and metal - give cold, hard, and often non-porous surfaces which just aren't that friendly to vegetation unless it's in a designated planter. And yet, when human activity ceases, it never takes long for a place to be reclaimed by nature. The fishing village of Houtouwan in China was abandoned in the 1990s and r...