On plants and plastic
When we started our wildlife gardening social enterprise, the last thing we wanted to do was contribute to the deluge of plastic in landfill, the oceans and even our bodies. But the gardening industry seems locked into an unhappy love affair with plastic, one that is hard to break.
The best way out is to grow your own, and our windowsills soon became crammed with seedlings, transferred into newspaper pots as they grew.
As yet Wilder has no growing space or greenhouse, and our capacity to produce the plants needed for our projects is limited. So we headed out to buy some plants.
A good first stop seemed to be the New Covent Garden Flower Market, which supplies the wholesale market in London. Naively, we were expecting our outing to resemble this:
In fact we found uniform rows of plants in plastic pots with plastic labels; there is even a supplier selling nothing but plastic ‘plants.’ Though the plants themselves, many grown in the Netherlands, are beautiful, this all seemed a far stretch from the eco practices we want to embed in our business. So we pedalled swiftly out of Nine Elms without having bought a thing.
We got our growing groove back on at two wonderful gardens in Hackney, which open to the public on Tuesdays for plant sales: St Mary’s Secret Garden and Core Landscapes. Both sell organically grown plants, and both support mental health projects. They are also lovely people, generous with advice and keen to make gardening affordable and accessible for all. And you can return the already reused plastic pots when you’re done.
The Wilder cargo bike, loaded with plants from St Mary’s Secret Garden
Another gardening ally is the brilliant Spring Garden Nursery based in a disused car park in Vauxhall, where they have pioneered a unique composting and solar heating system for their greenhouse. Spring Garden sell some plants from the Flower Market, but we bypassed those in favour of their own lovingly nurtured plants. Again, you can return the pots, prices are low, and the advice on dividing plants and taking cuttings is excellent.
Urban growing at Spring Garden Nursery, Vauxhall
Then we went online, in order to buy some particular climbers and wildlife friendly plants. When the boxes arrived it was pretty depressing in terms of plastic use, with plastic pots, plastic tags, plastic accessories thrown in as unwanted gifts and – in one case – thick non-recyclable plastic pods encasing the plants.
Plastic overload :0(
We complained, and in all cases the suppliers wrote back to say they are trying to decrease plastic use.
They should follow the example of Plant Wild, who send their plants padded with cardboard and straw – the straw looks and smells great, and we reused it as mulch in the kitchen garden we have created at the Jerwood Space. Plant Wild use taupe-coloured pots, which can be recycled once they have been reused, unlike black plastic pots.
Three cheers for Plant Wild
Meanwhile, our corner of London is bursting with showy flowers as the weather warms and we are coming out to eat, drink and chat outdoors. And many of these blooms are… made of plastic.
What a lovely display, of future landfill fodder
‘Plants’ in their ‘planters’
At the risk of coming across like misanthropes, we are planning to complain when we see plastic plants. The downside is that this may hasten the journey of these faux blooms to landfill, which they will bedeck for the next several hundred years. But collectively we need to buck this destructive trend, and try to keep things real and beneficial for people and for pollinators.
Real Lamb’s Ear plant (Stachys byzantina), visited by a real bee
