Own Grown Gardening

    I love getting my gardening ideas from all sorts of weird and wonderful places. Take for example this woodcut I stumbled across recently. It comes from a book entitled  Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus written in German, despite the Latin title, which translates as Book on the art of distillation out of simple ingredients. It was written in the year 1500 by a chap with the rather fancy name of Hieronymus Brunschwig. What really caught my eye in this woodcut, apart from the wonderfully dynamic garden-scape, is the gate. If you look closely, you can see it is actually a living entrance, two trees grafted together into an intricately patterned arch. I just love it! The interesting thing is that this example of living art is from so very early. The modern artist, Richard Reames, who makes remarkably similar living sculpture today, explains that the earliest example of this art-form he could find was from 1516. The technique used is so simple and yet so effectiv...

This little article on my very first bridge graft attempt ended up in  Plymouth Tree Partnership's newsletter as well as  Orchard Link's newsletter so it only seems right to share it with you too. Enjoy! It is amazing how this humble conference pear tree in Central Park Community Orchard , Plymouth, Devon has garnered so much interest. Let me tell its story. It begins back in November 2021 when I began volunteering as an Orchard Keeper for Plymouth Tree Partnership. While tending the Community Orchard’s young trees, a constant battle against brambles, this particular pear caught my eye.  It possessed a nasty injury, from canker perhaps, almost girdling the trunk. Only a pinkie finger’s worth of bark remained. My first thought was simply to prune the tree back below this point. But, loppers in hand, I simply could not bring myself to do it. The tree just looked so alive above the wound. That is when I thought a bridge graft might just give this tree a fighting chance. I’...