The weather this year is making even the indifferent aware that nature can make life uncomfortable. Places that are almost bywords for pleasant living and delicious produce have gone up in smoke.
It has been agonising to watch fire racing through forests and laying waste to people’s homes and livings. There has long been a green lobby urging us to take care of our world. Generations ago it was christened Only One Earth. I was fortunate to know one of its principal protagonists in this country, Dame Barbara Ward, and will never forget a summer night that a few of us spent walking round Possingworth lake in Sussex. I was learning to feel a part of nature.
Of course, it’s much harder to feel in London. We appreciate our parks alright, but how much thought do Londoners give to the trees that shade us and the green spaces where we can rest our eyes and minds?
The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association was founded (by a forebear of my father’s friend Lord Brabazon) getting on for two hundred years ago. Its impossible to say how much less green it would be without what the MPGA has been able to do, but nobody can deny it’s been worth doing, its results are all arounds us, and they help to make London the wonderful place it is to live and work.
We are all here because we know this. We also know it’s our responsibility to keep planting, to nurture our green assets and to add to them. It’s not enough to be passive and sit under trees. Our children and their children need more. Let’s get planting.
