Category: garden societies and allotments

This is serious! There are two pieces of Parliamentary legislation currently under consideration, both of which will affect gardeners: allotments and wildlife protection / climate change. Please take a look at the following websites. We urge you to read and consider the implications, then if you wish, petition, email or whatever else is asked, to safeguard ourselves and our children, grandchildren and future generations.

Allotments: “The government has decided to undertake a ‘Review of statutory duties’ with the aim of reducing the burden on local authorities. However they are considering removing the statutory duty to provide sufficient number of allotments for people in the area who want one. This would have the effect of putting all allotments under threat. There is a consultation process but it closes on 25th April 2011 so you need to ACT NOW and let the politicians know that allotments are important and should be protected.” Written by John Harrison in his allotment diary. He urges you to email your comments before  next Wednesday to burdens@communities.gsi.gov.uk. But if you don’t have time, sign the petition being organised by City Cottage.

Environment: On Monday, it was revealed that the government might scrap vital laws which protect wildlife and the countryside (the Wildlife and Countryside Act) and help to stop climate change (the Climate Change Act). “We need to work together to make sure our wildlife, our countryside and our planet are protected”, says the ‘people, power, change’ group, 38 Degrees. It only takes a few seconds to add your name to their petition. Just click here.

‘The Therapeutic Garden’

Writing personally, with tongue in cheek, and whilst acknowledging the severe lack of government funds (politics aside) – perhaps politicians don’t have time to garden! So probably they just don’t realise the benefits of growing our own food, being ‘green’; maybe as they “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels”, they have lost the home plot, the garden plot. And they are probably unaware that gardeners save NHS costs, for gardening aids health. As author Donald Norfolk (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health) wrote in ‘The Therapeutic Garden’: “dedicated to my green-fingered patients, who inspired me to write this book when I noticed that their love of gardening seemed to imbue them with an above average level of cheerfulness, contentment and physical fitness.” The book is a collection of fascinating and illuminating essays and well worth reading, whether you are a politician or not. Copies can be obtained second-hand from Amazon. (Just enter author and title.)

As ordinary ‘Jo Public’, and a gardener, your opinion DOES count. The public’s petitioning to save the sell-off of Forestry Commission woodland worked (via 38 Degrees), and the Government reversed their decision.