Jillian reviews - Resilient Garden by Tom Massey
Breaking it down: all the sustainable possibilities in one back garden.
If you’re the type of person to walk through your neighbourhood and spy on your neighbour’s front garden aesthetic, or feel the weight of depression press down on you when you witness yet another new build home with a barren wasteland of paving set out before it, this book could be your latest manifesto.
Garden creatively, garden cheaply, garden cleverly. Garden for climate change, garden for food, garden for the bees: take your pick. This book approaches gardening from so many helpful perspectives but the goal is the same: the future is green and you can have a hand in greening it.
Part design inspiration, part experimentation- Massey takes you through the latest sustainable gardening methods, using landscape architecture techniques to illustrate concepts clearly and easily. Before and after images of how to transform a lawn of death into a biodiversity haven of life or how to harvest rain water ( an increasingly urgent issue) fuel the gardener/reader’s creativity.
Complete this read and become equipped for a more climate resilient future, where people know what SUDS (sustainable urban drainage systems) means, or how to install a hugelkulture mound. Gardening is one of those ideal mixtures of science and art, and creating a resilient garden definitely invites an expression of both.