Sunday Supplement #5


Sunday Supplement is an occasional round up of the virtual and real here at VP Gardens. I'd like it to be a weekly event just like the best bits and reviews you get in the Sunday papers, but I'm not promising ;)
Web Watch

I'm unashamedly going to plug Britain From the Air again and the BBC slideshow presenting some of the 100 images comprising the exhibition. Our landscape is so diverse and these pictures show that even man-made features can look beautiful when seen from a different perspective.

Trending Topic

The campaign to prevent the government's sell-off of Forestry Commission land continues apace (see Sunday Supplement #3). A complementary campaign I spotted this week is the Woodland Trust's More Trees More Good which is promoting the increase of trees found in our everyday lives. Their My View tool allows any street scene or landscape picture to be taken and enhanced to show how much better the view looks when trees are added.

I can see this being used widely for anyone campaigning to make their neighbourhood a better place and I'm contemplating trying it out for next month's Out on the Streets.

Link Love

It was lovely to meet Emma of The Orchard Studio in Bath this week; something we've been trying to do for aaaaaaaaages. A mutual love of gardens, photography and squishy chocolate eclairs meant the time passed all too quickly. Emma is working on a very exciting project at the moment, which I'll be telling you more about soon :)

Blog Action

Comment of the Week: is from Lucy who wrote in response to my Britain from the Air post:

I'm wondering what Bath itself is like nowadays. I haven't been there for a number of years but, when I last went, I felt overwhelmed by the number of street theatre artists etc. - a bit like the way one ladybird is charming but to have them crawling everywhere (as we did one year) is alarming.

Lucy, I know exactly what you mean, though I usually love to watch a bit of street theatre when I go to Bath. They weren't so evident on Tuesday, probably because it wasn't one of the main shopping days. Also the Britain From the Air exhibition is taking up quite a lot of space they usually inhabit around the Abbey and main shopping drag.

NB Lucy's photography blog has now moved to Message in a Milk Bottle - well worth a visit.

Keyword Search of Note: is My dinner party got cancelled. I do hope you had some fun here instead. Perhaps this dinner time might be a good substitute?

Back to Reality:

Guess what: Thursday's stormy winds means last week's leaf clearing task is carried forward to this week too :o

Time Out
This week myself, Threadspider plus a number of other local bloggers and tweeters will all descend on Bath University Garden Club to hear Dan Pearson speak about The Millennium Forest. Google has thrown up a number of possibilities of where this might be; I thought it was in the Midlands, but it appears Scotland and St Helena also have contenders for the title.

We seem to be having a landscape/tree theme here this week, so what could be better than watching Making Scotland's Landscape, which tonight focuses on trees? 8pm, BBC2.

The picture is of some minimalist balcony gardening I spotted in Bath last week.

This time last year I'd found something for my Unusual Places strand, whilst in 2008 saw the launch of my spoof magazine, You Ask, We Answer. Finally, in 2007 I was distributing my leaf mould.

Comments

  1. petoskystone14 November 2010 at 13:23

    the u.k. only has 4% tree coverage? really?! given the lovely photos spread via mass media, i would have thought a much higher percentage. color me a shade of ignorance. neat site. the little space here doesn't have any trees to speak of to shed leaves, but yesterday i noticed the wild grape vine on the landlords fence had lost it's leaves overnight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. VP15 November 2010 at 08:41

    Petoskystone - the 4% figure was for Scotland in 1914 (ie before the start of WWI) which led to problems as the war's blockade meant the nation had real problems with wood supplies. It led to the formation of the Forestry Commission in 1919 to ensure the nation's supplies of wood would be sufficient for 5 years going forward.

    It means that Scotland's tree coverage now stands at 17% and the target is to reach 25% - the estimated coverage when the hunter gatherers settled down and became farmers many thousands of years ago.

    With the recent demise of the Forestry Commission following the government's spending review last month, I wonder whether this target is achievable going forward.

    I need to do some further research on the tree coverage figures for England and Wales.

    ReplyDelete

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