This sylvan scene is in the heart of London. Today I visited Edible Landscapes, a forest garden project which occupies a plot in the more municipal surroundings of Finsbury Park. 

 I've written about forest gardening and permaculture in a number of entries, particularly in reference to Martin Crawford's work in Devon. Suffice to say the basic ethos is to design a largely self-sustaining ecosystem using perennials that can be cropped for food and/or other practical uses.

 There are numerous smallholding scale forest gardens in rural parts of Britain; away from the urban centres it's still possible to go "back to the land". In a city like London permaculturalists tend to focus their efforts on community gardens as a way forward. Back gardens and allotments have scope for experimenting with forest gardening principles but needless to say very few people have an area big enough for a forest!

 Edible Landscapes grow a wide range of species suited to this approach. There are some familiar native and garden plants among them but many are not much seen outside of botanical gardens if at all. It's good to know that London has places like this. 

 

Hedgerows that were bursting with blossom in spring are now laden with berries.

 A walk in the Hertfordshire countryside confirms that the leaves are quite late to fall this year. The russet and ochre tones of autumn are in evidence but generally the shade is still green. 

 The Nasturtiums on the allotment keep on growing and flowering even in late October. Different varieties of Nasturtium have different growth habits ranging from compact to sprawling. These are definitely the spreading type!   

 I tickled the rhubarb patch with a fork to pluck out weeds and keep the couch grass at bay. Then I added a mulch of leaves which are part of nature's bounty at this time of year. Bare earth is often regarded as a sign of a 'tidy' garden or allotment but nature abhors a vacuum and that includes bare earth. The emergence of 'weeds' is the first step to repairing the damage done by exposing the soil.

 Having said that I don't want the rhubarb patch to become overgrown so I aim to protect and build the soil with mulches. Leaves decay over winter to make an excellent soil conditioner but they are low in nutrients. I watered the mulch with comfrey tea to add NPK. This also had the effect of wetting the dry leaves which will hopefully stop them from blowing away until they get properly soggy.

 Roots and shoots part four. Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens) is a plant with a deep tap root. This is a young specimen and it's already pretty long. Some plants have a mass of fibrous roots but a tap root grows straight down with smaller roots branching off. In doing so the plant can access moisture and nutrients at deeper levels and the root provides a very firm anchor.

 P. sempervirens is a widespread weed/wildflower with a mass of foliage and an abundance of small blue flowers in spring. Actually I would describe it as semi-evergreen rather than sempervirens. A prolonged cold spell may cause the foliage to die back but the tap root makes it pretty indestructible. And hard to eradicate as many gardeners have found. It's difficult to extract without snapping the root and will regenerate from what remains in the earth. 

 Actually -as I have said more than once in this diary- I like Green Alkanet. So do bees, they like it very much indeed. Certain plants resist our attempts to defoliate the planet and I place P. sempervirens in that category.

 

  It's not exactly a gravel garden but I've planted various bulbs in this old oil drum over the years. Self-seeders like Herb Robert and Purple Toadflax generally pop up too. I seem to have accumulated a number of cracked and broken terracotta pots so I smashed them up for a layer of chippings.

 

 The leaves are starting to turn but they haven't dropped en masse as yet. Green Park in central London (above) is still pretty green. The fall has probably been delayed somewhat by the wet weather we've had. It's been chilly at times but not bitingly cold and there haven't been gusty gales to shake the leaves off the branches.

 I wouldn't call this scene rural or picturesque by any means. England's green and pleasant land has long been encroached on by suburban sprawl. None the less this is an archetypal English landscape of a sort. Town meets country; in this case the outskirts of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. The ploughed field is indicative of intensive farming, the hills beyond evoke an ancient vista. The post-war housing is what the future used to look like.  

 Ivy (Hedera helix) is still in flower and still attracting pollinators. I passed a thick hedge of Ivy today and there were lots of wasps, a few flies and couple of bumblebees. Too chilly by now for honeybees. 

 Roots and shoots part three. Trachystemon orientalis is an easy plant to propagate. It spreads vigorously by rhizomes. Break off a section of rhizome and plant it somewhere else. That's about it really.

 T. orientalis thrives in shade, even deep dry shade. Sometimes called Oriental Borage it has Borage-like flowers in early spring. The leaves start small and grow considerably larger forming an effective ground cover through the summer months.  

 These Aquilegia vulgaris were part of the delivery of bare root plants I got from Shipton Bulbs recently. I haven't decided where to plant them so I potted them up a couple of weeks ago to plant out in the spring. They've sprouted the greenery in that short space of time so they're certainly in good health.

 

 Roots and shoots part two. The curiously named Fox and Cubs (Pilosella aurantiaca) spreads all over the allotments though it's native to alpine areas in southern and central Europe. Where it likes the conditions it can spread prolifically by seeds, stolons and rhizomes.

 As an experiment I dug up four or five and planted them in a large ceramic pot. That was last year and since then they have multiplied to cover the whole of the pot:

 

 One of the nice things about planting bulbs in autumn is that it creates the anticipation of what is to come just as the year starts to wane. My recent order from Shipton Bulbs included Crocus tommasinianus, Erythronium 'Pagoda', Wild Tulip, Star of Bethlehem and Winter Aconite.

 

 I also ordered five Stinking Iris (Iris foetidissima) as bare root plants with my recent order from Shipton Bulbs. NB they don't stink, the foliage just smells a bit musty if crushed. This is a tough as old boots plant that will grow in the deepest shade be it damp or dry. The flowers in early summer are exquisite though not prominent; the bright orange/red berries in autumn are hard to miss.

 As the photo shows they are sent out with some soil still attached wrapped in damp newspaper. This is sufficient to sustain them for a day or two during transit. I aim to unpack bare root plants immediately on delivery so they get air and sunlight. In this case I knew I wouldn't get around to planting them till later in the week so I sat them in a bag of compost with the fronds poking out. They will get some nutrition through the roots in the meanwhile.

 A plant as hardy as I. foetidissima won't be deterred by a bit of rough handling in this fashion. 

 

  Soloman's Seal (Polygonatum multiflorum) was one of the plants in my recent order from Shipton Bulbs. In fact it's a rhizome rather than a bulb. Propagation is by division; in this case chopping off a section of the rhizome where a bud has formed. I ordered five such and they arrived in a small bag of soil to keep them moist. Unlike many of the bulb species they would not survive being dried out.

 I've had mixed results trying to establish them and they seem quite picky as to location. Soloman's Seal is a spring flowering native of ancient woodlands but I can't say I've ever seen them growing wild. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough or in the right places. The patch shown below is a naturalistic planting on the edge of Regent's Park:

 Delivery of bulbs and bare root plants from Shipton Bulbs who specialise in cultivating wildflowers. When plants are dug up and transferred bare root from one place to another the roots and foliage inevitably take a bit of a battering. Tough plants like these will recover however. In fact I find they bed in better than pot grown plants which are often 'potbound' by the time of purchase.