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Thinking inside the (grow)box

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Manchester is a great city. Industrial heritage, urban grit and recent regeneration have combined to make it a hip 'n happening place to be. But there are no two ways about it: it's not a city known for its green spaces. The closest thing to resemble a park within half a mile of Ancoats is actually a canal basin. Step outside, and you're on the dusty inner ring road. Step a little further, and you're onto a patchwork of surface level car parks on the footprint of long-gone factories, extending nearly to the foot of Piccadilly. And yet, amidst the urban decay, there is a real green treasure. Bordered by trees on one side and rubbly car park on another are NQ Growboxes. Some planted with neatly dotted veggies, others almost hidden under sprawling lavender and sage, these dozen or so metre high raised beds are a little haven in the city. They've been on my radar since I moved to Manchester, and I immediately asked to sign up for one. Typically, there was a...
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Holding onto Summer

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Today, the low sun gave only a little snatched warmth as it spread its transient rays between the megaliths of the city. I caught a few of these lucky rays while I ate my sandwiches on the usual mooring post beside the Bridgewater Hall. The willows which overhang the canal and the floating vegetation were clinging onto their weary leaves, but with daytime temperatures barely set to reach zero, they're soon sure to drop, and ride the canal on a raft of dappled yellow. Where did Summer go? If I were to use one word to describe this Summer, it would have to be bountiful . It was superlative in so many ways - driest, hottest, sunniest. And it kept on giving, not least on the allotment. Plentiful sunshine, paired with lots of watering and a bit of TLC, gave us a whole run of different treats - from delicious egg-sized potatoes to gleaming courgettes, and from a shoebox full banana shallots to the countless punnets of runner beans we thought would never end, and handfuls of luminous...
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Incidental greenery

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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...
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