Honouring the invisible in the City of the Dead
wall on Pound Lane, not far from where the
first carriages drove in 150 years ago, you can
now look in on a line of cypress trees and mop-
headed topiary with climbers hugging the wall
in front of a burgeoning area of grass.
For this quadrat, which is labelled
‘Hi oric’ on new white signs, Fox took
inspiration from planting schemes of the
1950s, when the ‘Pound Lane Field’ area was
first put into use for burials.
At the opposite end, close to the
boundary with the Liberal Jewish Cemetery, a
se
ion has been planted with wild flowers.
This ‘Natural’ quadrat returns a new sense of
life to the area with a riot of colour that buzzes
with insects at its peak in May. (fig. 28)
We stopped spraying herbicide in one
area of the Old Ground to see if sele
ive
maintenance could be an option for future
management of the 21 acres. Weeds are pulled
up by hand or suppressed by new wild flower
seeding. It looks rough, as fits its label ‘Wild’,
but visitors are encouraged to give feedback to
help the cemetery’s management decide how
fast and far to reduce weed-killing in future.
Walking back toward the Lodge, you
can see four new luxuriant herbaceous borders
in exi ing garden areas. These imbue the focal
point of a visit to the House of Life with a
stature that had long been eroded. Worn
idioms of bushes, roses and lawn that were less
about tradition than lack of budget have been
replaced by stylish contemporary planting that
gives the scene a new sense of style and energy.
(fig. 29)
The House of Life Visitor Centre with
its glass extension was conceived by Richard
Griffiths Archite
s. Designer Philip
Simpson’s new displays inside can be
experienced as a whole visit in themselves, or
as a launchpad for setting off to explore.
Outside, new interpretive panels and discovery
trails open up more of the worlds of Willesden
and its burials.
A major further piece was due to fall into
place in 2022 with the in allation of a
sympathetic pair of iron gates that will re-
establish the drama of arrival at Willesden
Jewish Cemetery (fig. 30).
Supported by grants from the London
Borough of Brent’s Neighbourhood
Community Infrastru
ure Levy and the
Ironmongers’ Company, the forging of new
41
gates will be an important piece of place-
making for the immediate neighbourhood,
signalling a sense of friendly welcome to all
who desire to follow their curiosity and step
inside.
Hester Abrams was Head of Heritage at
Willesden Jewish Cemetery until June 2022
Contact: Linkedin.com/in/hesterabrams
The Visitor Centre is open Monday to Thursday
mornings and on Sundays
www.willesdenjewishcemetery.org.uk
*******
‘My garden’s boundaries are the
horizon’: gardening and grief in a
collapsing climate
By The Perambulator
he quotation in the title comes from
T Derek Jarman’s introdu
ory
description of his garden at Prospect
Cottage on the shingle at
Dungeness.1 It is a beautiful phrase but it is
also a challenging one because the idea of a
garden as a secluded space is deeply embedded
in our culture; almost all etymologies for the
word garden trace it back to the idea of
enclosure. But in important ways a garden is
not apart from the world at all; perhaps we
should consider whether all gardens are, in
reality, as exposed as Jarman’s to what is
happening beyond their boundaries.
The Chelsea Flower Show returned
from virtual reality to the banks of the Thames
this year: as the RHS announced
triumphantly, ‘The world’s greatest flower
show returned to spring with stunning garden
designs, gorgeous floral displays and endless
shopping.’2 I didn’t go but reading the RHS’s
highlights there was a very clear and welcome
theme of looking outwards to those horizons
beyond the garden wall: a rewilding garden, an
urban foraging garden, a garden
commemorating the Mangrove Nine and
seeking to highlight global defore ation and
social injustice, a garden centred on a giant
1. Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, (London: Vintage Books, 1991),
p.3.
2. https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-chelsea-flower-show/.
T HE LO ND O N GA RD ENER or The Gardener’s Intelligencer Vol no. For the year 

31. Rockery Stone: Workmen rising the well-weathered limestone from the slopes of Ingleborough with crow bars,
30th May 1936.
(Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1936, on his visit to the Chelsea Flower Show, the King admired the picturesque rockeries built with waterworn
limestone from Ingleton, Yorkshire; from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth century, the stripping
out of limestone pavement had proceeded on an almost industrial scale to satisfy the demand for garden rockwork.
The widespread destruction of this rare habitat was only curtailed in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

42
 gardening and grief in a collapsing climate
block of melting ice, offering ‘a reminder of
the climate perils facing our planet’, and even
a Blue Peter Garden encouraging us to
‘discover soil’.
Some of the conjun
ions with sponsors
felt a little incongruous: an urban reclamation
garden sponsored by a wealth management
consultancy; a garden in which to ‘decompress,
play and reconnect’ sponsored by the estate
agents Hamptons; a balcony garden for those
with limited outdoor space sponsored by the
global cruise company Viking; a garden
celebrating global travel sponsored by a high-
end jewellery and diamond company; and a
garden celebrating the ‘resilience’ of our
woodland ecosy ems sponsored by Meta
(formerly Facebook). You get the pi
ure.
Of course Chelsea is a shop window not
just for garden designers but for businesses
eager to share the magic and razzamatazz, and
to improve their reputations by association.
And it will always be easy to raise an eyebrow
at some of the business sponsorship. Global
tourism, diamonds, the movement of
international capital in search of profit, the UK
housing crisis, the impact of Facebook on
culture, let alone ‘endless shopping’, are all
both causes and symptoms - increasingly
impossible to ignore - of the collapse of a
healthy relationship to the natural world and
the ecosy ems on which human life depends.
In 2019, Chris Beardshaw’s garden was
designed to encourage gardeners away from
‘the linear pra
ices of extract, consume,
discard’ towards minimising wa e of finite
resources. In its design and constru
ion, it was
a litany of light touch innovations: electric
digger for the ground works, low-carbon
concrete, recycled porcelain paving and so on.
Its sponsors? Morgan Stanley, one of the six
largest US banks which since the Paris climate
agreement in 2015 have poured $1.4tn into the
fossil fuel indu ry, $64bn in 2021 alone, long
after the ecocidal and indeed suicidal nature of
such inve ment has been made clear.
In one view, gardening has always been
the plaything of the very wealthy – a model of
conspicuous consumption, resource-intensive
spaces that benefit the lucky few rather than
the majority. In this view, gardens are – as this
Chelsea show again illu rated with a special
category of show-garden - ‘san
uaries’, places
to escape, refuges, securely insulated from the
43
world outside. As if such a disconnect were
possible let alone desirable.
An alternative view however would
suggest that gardening, as control of land and
control of the means of producing food, has
often been associated with challenges to that
paradigm. This is especially clear in Latin
America and in Africa where food sovereignty
and political resi ance have long been linked,
but can also be seen for example in the sharing,
repair-reuse-recycle ethos of allotment-
gardening in the UK, in the guerrilla and
community gardening movement which has
developed in US cities since the 1970s and
in the extraordinary wartime gardens
documented in Kenneth Helphand’s book
Defiant Gardens: gardens made in ghettos, in
front-line trench sy ems and in prisoner-of-
war and internment camps . And it may look a
long way from Chelsea to campaigns in the
global south over GM seeds but if it does, it is
a step worth taking.
In 2001 the US Supreme Court agreed
that companies could take out patents on
hybrid plants and seeds and in 2013 Monsanto
(now Bayer) won a court case that e ablished
a prohibition on saving, swapping or re-
planting of patented seed, requiring farmers to
buy their seed each year, along with the
fertiliser needed to grow it. The threat posed
by the four giant agri-tech businesses to
traditional plant-breeding and to genetic
diversity is now widely recognised and the
object of many campaigns and legal
challenges.3
For gardeners, the idea of seed-saving
and sharing being illegal is shocking: it’s also
an entirely logical endpoint of capitalist
business pra
ice. We know biodiversity is
essential to life on earth: the commercial drive
to reduce it either dire
ly like Monsanto or
indirectly like most global business is by its
nature destru
ive of life, including human life.
The urgency of food-growing and
protecting the soil from desertification may
seem remote concerns in the UK; a matter for
TV news coverage of droughts and floods
‘elsewhere’ on the planet. But gardening needs
to address the same priorities here. Our
reliance on other countries to feed us is
3. In 2018 Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, ChemChina, and Limagrain
held a 66.5% share of the global seed market. 75% of the world’s food
is produced from only twelve plants, the seeds for four of which –
corn, wheat, rice and soya – are largely controlled by patent.
T H E LO N D O N GARD EN ER or The Gardener’s Intelligencer Vol no. For the year 

32. Crowds admiring the rock gardens at Chelsea in May 1952

(Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo. Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS)

44
 gardening and grief in a collapsing climate
looking increasingly reckless.4 And while we
may kid ourselves that the home of David
Attenborough and the National Trust is a
beacon of good pra
ice, in fact the UK is one
of the most nature-depleted countries in the
world, bottom of the G7 and in the bottom
10% of countries globally.5
We may shake our heads at the
deva ation of the Amazon rainfore s, but we
need to look at the disappearance of our
lowland wildflower meadows, almost entirely
destroyed since the second world war, or the
killing fields of the East Anglian arable
prairies; after decades of inse
icides and
herbicides, no longer soil but a lifeless dust
turned into a growing medium by the input of
chemical fertilisers and intensive irrigation.
Our soils are dying as surely as the soils of sub-
Saharan Africa; our songbirds disappearing as
fast as the macaws and parakeets of the
tropical rainforests.
Most gardeners, most of Chelsea’s
designers, under and and respect the soil and
the ecological networks – birds, insects,
earthworms, mycelium and mycorrhizal
sy ems - that support not only their gardens
but life itself. It is just that, as in their
continued use of peat to grow the plants for
the Chelsea gardens,6 they cannot untangle
themselves from the economic forces which
are driving the destru
ion of those systems;
allowing businesses not only to continue to
‘extract, consume and discard’, but also to
cloak themselves in a celebration of the
beauties of gardening. (figs. 31 & 32)
And most gardeners know what the
climate and ecological emergency looks like.
They have the evidence in front of their eyes,
indeed in their hands, every day. They know
how depleted of life the soil is becoming. They
know that the beetles, centipedes, millipedes,
worms, spiders, slow-worms, which were once
abundant, are now scarce. They know that the
hedgehogs which were once common are now
seldom seen; that insects have suffered a
cata rophic decline in numbers and that
4. See The Perambulator’s last rant, ‘The Madness of Avocados’, in
The London Gardener no. 25 for the year 2021.
5. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/10/nearly-
half-of-britains-biodiversity-has-gone-since-industrial-revolution.
6. https://www.hortweek.com/rhs-defends-chelsea-peat-
stance/landscape/article/1787674. Ironically, the RHS this year
awarded a gold medal to a garden demonstrating the ecological
importance and extreme vulnerability of the UK’s peat beds.
Fortunately, we get two-thirds of our peat from beds elsewhere in
Europe (so that’s okay then).
45
garden birds which were once plentiful are
now rare. They know that reassurances that
everything will be okay - robot nano-
pollinators and the rest7 - are really not
tru worthy.
The tension between gardens as places
to retreat from the world and gardens as
illu rations of our collapsing ecosy ems feels
twangingly tight. How long can we pretend
that we can escape into gardens, or ignore the
truths gardens offer up to us about the state of
the climate and the natural world?
The US writer and academic Jamaica
Kincaid asked in a 2001 essay in The New
Yorker, ‘Why must people insist that the
garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to
forget the cares of the world, a place in which
to di ance yourself from the painful
responsibility that comes with being a human
being?’8 She was talking about gardens –
specifically Middleton Place, the famous
plantation house near Charle on – as the
product of enslaved labour. But the question
resonates still wider. Gardens not only
confront us with the deva ation of ecosy ems
now underway – every time you remember
how many more butterflies there used to be on
your buddleia, or how many more sparrows
there used to be in a hedge – but they also
invite us to grieve for that loss.
Which brings me back to Prospect
Cottage – how aptly named. It is another
defiant garden: defiant of the elements in
being created on the shingle of a beach
exposed to gales and salt-laden spray; defiant
of conventional ae hetics with its objets
trouvés salvaged from the detritus of the
foreshore; defiant of the threatening presence
of the power station. And defiant too of death
and loss – Jarman was forever replacing plants
or objects after the destru
ion wrought by yet
another storm.
The garden at Prospect Cottage has
been described as one which confronts loss and
grief, rather than shutting them out. Rather
than a walled, artificial paradise, it is a garden
open to the deva ation of natural forces and
the exi ential threat of the nuclear rea
or on
the horizon. The power station and the shingle
may have provided a pleasurably perverse
7. https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/robobees-autonomous-
flying-microrobots/.
8. Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Sowers and Reapers: the unquiet world of a
flower bed’, The New Yorker, 22 January 2022, pp 41-45.
 T H E LO N D O N GARD EN ER or The Gardener’s Intelligencer Vol no. For the year 
antidote to the pi
uresque but when the
alarms went off one night, the possibility of an
all-consuming explosion was real. And
Jarman’s book, Modern Nature, documents not
only the endless losses of plants to the
elements in such a harsh environment, but also
the emotional entanglement of the garden
with the loss of friends to the AIDS epidemic.9
It was a garden which embraced its own
precariousness, the opposite of a san
uary. I
would venture that Jarman understood that in
the modern era it is only through being open
to – vulnerable to - things falling apart that we
can find meaning.
That description of Prospect Cottage is
in an essay, published in the 2010 book Queer
Ecologies, which di inguishes between
melancholia over environmental loss as part of
the stru
ure of feeling in modern life and grief
which disrupts and defies that structure.
Melancholia over nature – as manife ed for
example in ecotourism or documentaries over
threatened species and places - is everywhere.
Grief we continue to ignore as too difficult,
too disruptive of business as usual, to confront.
Richard Bruce Anderson, one of the
founders of the idea of ecopsychology, wrote in
2001, ‘At the heart of the modern age is a core
of grief. At some level, we’re aware that
something terrible is happening, that we
humans are laying wa e to our natural
inheritance.’10 Loss and grief are increasingly a
conscious part of our relationship to the
natural world. To conceive of gardens as
escape pods, or as an extension of ‘endless
shopping’, renders them irrelevant and even
complicit in the forces that are continuing to
drive life on earth towards extin
ion.
*******
9. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer
Ecologies’, in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
ed., Queer Ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010).
10. http://www.forthefuture.org/assets/articles/col_grief.htm.
46
Mrs Elizabeth Wright, Madame la
Comtesse de Vandes (c. 1758–1832):
English plantswoman and her
Bayswater garden
By E. Charles Nelson
‘Perhaps more new plants have been published in
botanical works as having first flowered here, than in
any private garden round London.’ 1
hereas gardening is usually
W regarded as a masculine occupation
and eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century professional gardeners were almost
invariably men, a small number of women
were influential as garden owners by
assembling important colle
ions of plants,
which were significant as the sources of
illustrations and descriptions of new species.
In England, they included Princess Augu a of
Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Dowager Princess of
Wales (1719–1772), who developed the royal
gardens at Kew, Margaret Cavendish
Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–1785),
whose garden and collections at Bul rode
Hall in Buckinghamshire were known to Mrs
Mary Delany (1700–1788) among many others,
and Lady Amelia Hume (1751–1809) to whom
the founder of the Linnean Society of
London, James Edward Smith, dedicated his
book Spicilegium Botanicum (1791–1792). Less
well-known, yet a close contemporary of Lady
Hume, was Elizabeth, Comtesse de Vandes
(c.1758–1832),2 formerly Mrs Elizabeth Wright,
whose plant colle
ion at Bayswater, London,
contained numerous novelties that were
models for portraits in the fashionable
botanical publications of the early nineteenth
century including Curtis’s Botanical Magazine,3
four of Andrews’s works (Botanist’s Repository,
Coloured engravings of heaths, Geraniums and
Roses), a trio of Sweet’s works (British Flower
Garden, Flora Australasica and Geraniaceae),
Lindley’s Collectanea Botanica and Salisbury’s
Paradisus Londinensis (see Appendix). Around
1. [ J. C. Loudon], ‘Calls at the London nurseries, and other
suburban gardens. … Bayswater Garden, Comte de Vandes …’, The
Gardener’s Magazine vol 1, 1826, p.349.
2. There is a very sparse entry for De Vandes, Elizabeth, in R. G. C.
Desmond and C. Ellwood, Dictionary of British and Irish botanists
and horticulturists, revised edition (London, 1992), p.204, with the
comment that ‘many of her plants were figured in botanical
magazines’. On the other hand there is no entry for her garden in R.
G. C. Desmond, Bibliography of British gardens (Winchester, 1984).
3. R. G. C. Desmond, A celebration of flowers. Two hundred years of
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (London, 1987), p.56.