The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet

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It seems that Europe’s own colonial and neocolonial institutions are not what made it possible to build the European "garden" - with the labour of immigrants from the “rest of the world” and with the stolen wealth of the "rest of the world". Rather, according to Borrell and the rest of Europe’s white supremacists, with the fantasised ingenuity of Europeans themselves. I don’t dig up dahlias to store them at the end of the summer. And before you dig your dahlias up, it’s important to know the pros and cons. You…

So, what’s the solution? Then came the punch line: “The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.” The Garden Jungle is about the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement and in the soil beneath our feet. Wherever you are right now, the chances are that there are worms, woodlice, centipedes, flies, silverfish, wasps, beetles, mice, shrews and much, much more, quietly living within just a few paces of you. Find out how to prune English lavender to make it look better and last longer. Photos of my lavender from 2013-2023 are proof that it works!There are so many plants that could be added to a jungle garden. The beauty of foliage-based gardens is that you can create one in any size garden and even in containers on a balcony. For some inspiration try and look for local gardens you can visit through the National Garden Scheme, if there is nothing local then take some inspiration from this amazing jungle gardens based in Leeds.

Henstead Garden in Suffolk is also an ‘exotic garden’, named as Garden of the Year by Alan Titchmarsh in 2015. A few words on peat: it’s not a renewable resource! It binds carbon and using it for garden center earth is harmful to the environment. So if there is one take away from this review it is this: buy only peat free earth for your garden! Before he died, Christopher Lloyd started his last book, Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners. It was finished by his friends, and is considered one of the best books on exotic gardens you’ll find. The most valuable chapter is on pesticides – it’s truly alarming how widespread they are, and how difficult to avoid. He describes organic food / growing your own in the language of Pascal’s wager: along the lines of ‘you might as well avoid pesticides; even if we one day find out that they weren’t so bad after all, you would have lived a pretty healthy and environmentally low-impact life’ (pp. 89–90). Then the author described how he likes to collect, skin, chop up, freeze and cook roadkill. This was one eccentricity too far for me (and also, like the recipes, only tenuously related to gardening — it seemed more like proselytising).I now want to have a mini pond, put up bug hotels all over, and plant a few dwarf apple trees to try some of the 700+ varieties available, and plan to grow as much as I can from seeds, and as many different varieties as possible. And Will Giles’ book Exotic Plants for Temperate Climes is rated highly. It’s a useful directory of plants that will survive in your garden but will add an exotic touch. We spoke with jungle garden expert George Lowther from georgesjunglegarden. We asked him for a couple of tips for creating an exotic jungle style garden, and he provided the following excellent advice: De Tocqueville, who was so enamoured of the US republic of slavery, which he dubbed a "democracy", wrote that white Americans have much "national vanity": "The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise... They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous." The increasingly institutionalised racism against Europe’s non-white peoples whether in Spain and Germany, Italy and France, Britain and the Netherlands, to name the most prominent examples, are clearly not sufficient to dissuade Borrell of the fictional version he has of Europe.