The Organic Garden

The Bench

Now that you’ve decided on the basic structure of your garden, the next thing you need is a bench. Some people may argue for shed, tools, seeds, but I reckon bench. Of course, under the bench heading I’d include hammock, chair swing, stool, recliner, deck chair, turf chair, chaise longue or anything upon which one may park one’s bottom – or, even better, lie down. Somewhere from which to survey the garden, dream dreams, make plans and entertain guests. I’ve shaped a whole area of my garden around a bench and postponed planting the beds around it until I know it works as a good place to sit. That’s how important this bench thing is to me, and my benches are organic.

The natural materials to use in my garden are slate and wood. These are the two materials that lie beneath and around me in huge quantities. So it’s quite in keeping with the garden to use waste slate and wood materials wherever I can. The previous owner left copious quantities of both when he left and I’ve been cursing him ever since I moved in. But when I got round to making my bench I said a little prayer for him instead.

You have to know that my garden is made up of a set of flat and sloping steep terraces, a large, slightly messy pond and a variety of slate walls, all facing north-east. The sun shines in the morning on all parts of the garden but only on one part from the afternoon on (the small plot I have given over to those sunlight-hungry families of plants we call vegetables). My bench sits snugly into the sloping earth overlooking the pond. It gets the morning sunlight beautifully (apart from about one half hour or so when the sun passes behind an enormous conifer planted by my neighbour as a 30cm-high sapling thirty years ago). When the day is at its hottest, the bench is only dappled by sunlight and becomes a fantastically cool place to retreat to when working the garden is no longer a pleasure. Before I cleared the area it was a mass of old building timber, chicken wire and felled conifer hedge – a combination of the previous owner’s waste and my own garden trimmings. Clearing it has been a monumental task and it would have been easier to have put my bench somewhere else, but nowhere else would do. From here I am close enough to my pond to see my frogs blink and far away enough from my neighbour’s titanic decking (which haunts my garden like a hovering buzzard) to avoid the hot fat that I feel sure will rain down upon me if they ever have a barbecue when I’m lying on my lawn.

Ethical choice: turf benches

My bench is quite a rudimentary affair, in that it just sits on the earth. My eco-builder friends Jenny and Medhi have created many similar benches for their festival gardens, including a long turf bench shaped as a snake, with individual seats carved along the snake’s back. Using a natural material like earth is convenient if you happen to be digging a pond or a sunken area and need to do something with the earth you’ve dug from the hole. You can even buy cardboard cutouts to help you shape the earth like a grass armchair (www.purves.co.uk). There’s also a plan for a turf sofa at www.readymademag.com, an excellent American website with lots of DIY projects.

Making furniture with green wood

Most carpentry work is done using wood that has been seasoned, which means it has been left until the moisture has completely gone (which takes a couple of years). The wooden benches you get in your average high-street store are made from seasoned wood. They are also usually treated with a preservative, which may contain toxic materials harmful to the environment. Green wood, as the name suggests, is wood that has been freshly cut and not left to dry out. The tools and the techniques for using green wood are quite different than for standard carpentry but are actually very good for the average gardener prepared to spend a bit of time learning the tricks of the trade. This is mainly because most of the materials you need can come from your own garden, as long as you’ve got a few trees or a hedgerow. Or ask your local park, woodland or local authority if they have any hedge trimmings or unwanted felled wood you could use.

The simplest form of green woodworking is stick furniture. This is literally furniture made from sticks harvested from hedgerows and coppiced woodlands. Stick furniture doesn’t last for ever but then it doesn’t matter if your mood changes and you want to replace it with something else. Just use the old chair for kindling. I’ve seen the same principle applied to an office made out of cardboard. The whole thing takes very little energy to make and is completely recyclable once the client has tired of it. Stick furniture is a lovely addition to any garden and you can book yourself on a day course for not much money (www.bodgers.org.uk, or locally to me Sylvantutch +44 (0) 1654 761614). For slightly more advanced homemade benches you could consider investing in a pole lathe (a footoperated device for turning wood), a set of lathe tools and a book such as Ray Tabor’s Green Woodworking Pattern Book. This contains more than 300 projects, ranging from stick furniture to tool making to gates, fences, hanging baskets, bird tables, compost bins, arbours and trellis. For most of the projects you just need access to a handful of basic hand tools (no power tools are used) and some coppiced wood from a hedgerow or local woodland. If you just fancy having a go at green woodworking, check out local green fairs, festivals or country shows. There’s usually an opportunity to make something simple with a wood lathe. If you live in London get yourself down to the Woodland Wonders Fair at Kew Gardens held every May Bank Holiday, see www.rbgkew.org.uk/events.

Ethical choice: living willow

If you need a throne for your kingdom, how about a living willow chair? Better for the environment because you don’t have to use materials that have been shipped over great distances and processed using machinery powered by fossil fuels. Majestic and alive, like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, living willow chairs carry on growing, providing fresh growth every year for you to trim and use for other willow projects such as basket making. Be careful where you plant it, though. Willow roots are notoriously aggressive and willows drink a lot of water. They’re fast growing and are good for helping to reduce the moisture content in wet soils. They will compete with vegetables so don’t plant too close to your crops. You can also make living willow hedges and arbours. Jon Warnes’s book Living Willow Sculpture is an excellent place to start, as is www.thewillowbank. com. The Willow Bank is run by Steve Pickup, one of the country’s most experienced willow growers and weavers (see below). You can pick up a bundle of willow cuttings ready for planting, a set of instructions to make your own dome and an extra DVD if you need a little bit of visual stimulation.

Buying garden furniture

Buying stuff can be fun too and there are so many nice pieces of beautifully made, sustainable and ethical furniture out there, it’s a shame not to support the suppliers if you’ve got the spare cash. Individually made items tend to be more expensive than the sort of factory-made furniture you can buy in chain stores, but you can guarantee what you’re getting is unique. Agricultural and smallholding shows, green fairs, festivals and other events are always good places to find locally made handcrafted wooden furniture. Websites such as www.allotmentforestry.com, www.coppice-products.co.uk and www.greenwoodcentre.org.uk offer courses and directories of people making and selling handmade wooden furniture.

In Wales the Welsh Timber Forum produce a buyer’s guide to buying (www.welshtimberforum.co.uk). If you go down the mass-produced route always look for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) symbol (see page 48), but also check whether the finished product has been made in Britain. Sometimes wood is shipped from Scandinavia to China, turned into furniture and shipped back again. This all seems a bit crazy when British-made furniture grown from UK or European wood is available. A UK or European product also gives you certain guarantees about the way the workers are treated. (See also pages 26–29.)

What is the FSC?

The FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) ensures that natural forests are conserved, that endangered species and their habitats are protected, and that forest workers and forest-dependent communities are respected. Unlike other certification schemes, the FSC was set up independent of industry and has broad support from conservation groups, indigenous communities and forest product buyers. It gives equal decision-making rights to economic, social and environmental interests in its governing structure and standard-setting process. It is the preferred standard for gardening organisations such as the RHS and conservation bodies like The World Wide Fund for Nature and the RSPB. At www.fsc-uk.org, their buyer’s guide includes a league table of mainstream retailers who stock FSC furniture. Top (A) ratings (100 per cent of furniture FSC-approved) go to B&Q, Asda, Wyevale, Tesco and Marks & Spencer.

The rainforest in our gardens

Felled timber from rainforests is often mixed with other fibres and hidden in chipboard products or turned into garden fencing. Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots, which means they are wonderfully species rich, and their destruction can lead to the extinction of whole species. There are only 60,000 gorillas left in the world and 5,000 are lost every year as their forest habitats are cleared. At this rate they will be gone within twelve years. We can help by avoiding products that may contain wood from felled rainforests. Always look for the FSC label. The Greenpeace online Garden Furniture Guide is the most comprehensive guide to finding FSC-approved garden furniture products: www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests. Think about contributing to some of the charitable organisations that buy up areas of rainforest to save them from logging (try www.rainforest-alliance.org). Boycotting is more effective if it is backed up with positive action to preserve and protect.

It’s impossible to list all UK manufacturers of ethical garden furniture but here are a few for starters: www.britisheco.com, www.handmadehammocks.co.uk, www.hammocks.co.uk (Fairtrade hammocks from Mexico), www.pendlewood.com. I also liked www.tinglondon.com who make stylish hammocks out of recycled seat belts. If you look at only one website check out www.reelfurniture.co.uk, an imaginative company making entirely handcrafted furniture from old cable reels. Visit www.rd.se and www.purves.co.uk for cardboard seats, www.readymademag.com for plans for a turf sofa, www.salvo.co.uk for salvage merchants, and www.reuze.co.uk, www.marmaxproducts.co.uk and www.theurbangarden.co.uk for information about recycled products; www.ethical-junction.org is a general link to sites for green and ethical products. Enough already!

Shed’s dead

I’ve never been a builder. My knowledge of carpentry is small. My aptitude for construction minimal. At school I got a U at woodwork, despite the fact I skipped PE for two years to take extra lessons. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, I think I’m going to build my own shed. This isn’t a temporary thought: this is a long-held belief, stretching back a decade. One of the reasons I chose the garden I have now is the potential for it to house a shed on stilts. A shed on stilts! As if the task of constructing a shed on flat land wasn’t hard enough. Nevertheless at some point a shed will be built and I will do the building. Why? Because really I want to build a house, and building an eco-shed is the first step.

Why ‘shed’s dead’?

Apart from wanting to reference Bruce Willis’s performance in Pulp Fiction, why have I called this section Shed’s Dead? After all, a shed is a wonderful thing – probably the closest thing gardeners have to a cultural icon. It’s a triumph of simplicity and efficiency, combining as it does several important gardening functions within its four thin walls. Being a simple, effective place to store tools is probably the least important job it does. Most non-gardeners wonder what the allure of the shed can be: it’s such a drab, soulless-looking place from the outside. Step inside, however. and you’re immediately in another world. A place where a deckchair, a bottle of wine or a flask of tea is always close by. Where a wind-up radio can be kept wound and primed for a Sunday afternoon of Gardeners’ Question Time on Radio Four. Where the world and its wife can just go and play somewhere else, quite frankly.

I don’t just want a shed, I want a home office with a wood stove and a place to sling a hammock if I feel like sleeping over.

So why would I wish the shed dead? Well, I think we can do better. The first clue came midway through the last paragraph. Why are sheds so drab and soulless? Look at any of the seemingly endless number of shed websites and you will see the same bland carboncopy boxes coming up again and again. They don’t give any clue to the personality of the owner. They don’t blend in with a garden. They don’t add anything apart from convenience to a space. No character. No inspiration. No sense of imagination. A shed is a thing to be hidden by plants, to be shoved into the corners of a garden, to be rendered invisible if possible. Or in the worst gardens, just placed without any thought whatsoever so it sticks out like a tower block amongst tiny rows of terraced-house vegetables. A towering example of mass-produced modernity.

All this could be forgiven if sheds met high environmental criteria, but unless you buy an FSC-approved shed you don’t really know what you’re getting. Buying the average shed is a journey into the unknown. Imagine you’ve just created your beautiful eco-friendly garden. Everything’s carefully laid out to be pleasing to the eye and the soul. And now you need some storage. Well, the average shed is just not doing it for me.

The company Forest Garden supplies DIY shops and garden centres with wood products for the garden, including sheds, using timber cut from FSC-approved UK forests owned by the Forestry Commission. Look out for their label and visit www.forestgarden.co.uk/stockists.asp for the nearest place to buy. Also try www.grange-fencing.com for timber sheds and summerhouses. B&Q and Focus both sell FSC-approved sheds. Try www.greatlittlegarden.co.uk for a range of European-grown FSCapproved timber products, as well as www.simply-summerhouses.co.uk. There are now a number of recycled plastic sheds on the market. Look at: www.langhalegardens.co.uk, www.hudsonwright.net/plastic-storage-sheds.htm, www.heskethsplastics.com/recycled.htm.

What I haven’t said yet is that I don’t just want a shed, I want a home office with a wood stove and a place to sling a hammock if I feel like sleeping over. My shed will have star-gazing windows and a balcony. A hot plate for making tea and a little mouse-proof store for provisions. I imagine my shed will be a little like old Ratty’s house in Wind in the Willows, only with a loftier view. Occasionally I’ll get a visit from Mole and we’ll take a picnic down to the lawn. Nasturtium flowers will hang down from small wooden pots and I shall graze on the peppery leaves. From the balcony I will be able to survey the weed situation in the whole of my garden with a small spyglass, like a sailor looking out to sea for a sight of the enemy. It’s a fantasy, but, if you haven’t got a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

I started having my shed fantasy way back at Robert Plant’s place when my friend Kevin Beale built one of Britain’s first straw bale buildings: a garden shelter constructed with bales, reclaimed timber, secondhand pallets and lime render (an eco finishing material). It’s the first time I’d ever watched a craftsman at work. Building was a logical step-by-step process. But it was also an art form. The shed was finished off with sculptured lizards climbing down the corners towards the soil. It gave me a privileged close-up view of the art of making something out of nothing. Shed Zeppelin was a fairly bulky number – never use straw bales in a tight squeeze – and it lacked the finesse other materials would have allowed, but it was made on next-to-no budget and worked. It’s still there on Robert’s farm, even though the rest of the garden has sadly passed up the stairway to heaven to that great allotment in the sky.

Ethical choice: materials to avoid

Avoid using materials like PVC, vinyl and other non-recycled plastics. They each take a lot of energy to produce and they create harmful chemicals. Cindy Harris and Pat Borer, authors of CAT’s The Whole House Book, state that the avoidance of PVC is now ‘virtually a hallmark of green, environmentally sensitive building’. They also note that MDF (medium-density fibreboard) has been dubbed the ‘asbestos of the 90s’.

So what’s the alternative? The ecological shed

The first alternative to the dead shed is not to have a shed at all. If you just want somewhere to store a few tools, perhaps a lovingly constructed homemade waterproof box will do. The second is to buy a bespoke shed made to your specification, and the third is to make your own.

To give you some ideas I’ve enlisted the help of architects and eco-designers Jenny and Mehdi (www.jennyandmehdi.org). Jenny and Mehdi spend a month most summers creating the garden for Greenpeace at the Glastonbury Festival. This is always a showcase for low-impact, beautiful spaces made using reclaimed and organic materials. I’ve had the pleasure of helping them construct one of their garden structures – a cordwood wall using natural clay and cut logs of English hardwood. On a burning hot Glastonbury day I had the coolest feet in the field, treading straw into wet clay to form the principal bonding material for the wall.

The process of working with natural materials is much more pleasurable, fun and creative than working with bricks and concrete blocks. Jenny and Mehdi are fantastically imaginative people, able to combine a love of organic spaces with the practical know-how to do the building work themselves. In their treehouse described on the following pages, we have tried to put together a package of design ideas for different-sized gardens and different budgets, but what the three of us feel is that you can take any of the elements that we describe and adapt them to your own situation.

At the heart of Jenny and Mehdi’s philosophy is the idea that the word ‘organic’ should refer just as much to the structures of a garden as to the plants. My only regret with this section is that it cannot go deep enough. Structures and plants need to mesh in a garden to create total atmosphere. It would have been lovely to give you a step-by-step guide to how to make this happen, but there just wasn’t the space. I hope though that there is enough here to inspire you to look deeper. And see what’s possible with a little thought and understanding.

Shed cred – welcome to the treehouse

Shed Zeppelin replaced an old caravan. The caravan was ugly and badly insulated. There was no fire and in the winter we shivered around a gas cooker, grilling tomatoes or cheese on toast. Kevin’s straw bale structure was a luxury apartment compared to this. It was big enough to function as store room, mess house, meeting place and, occasionally (more in the summer than winter), crash pad for tired gardeners with early morning duties to perform. It was a good multi-function space for the whole year.

Jenny and Mehdi’s garden structure in Kay Zitron’s garden in Aberdovey is quite a different affair. Not at all chunky, it shows off the elegance of wood in an open summer stage topped with a curved roof garden and complemented by an enchanting (noises off) room for grandchildren. Kay wanted a structure that would connect an existing patio to a courtyard garden below, that would give her panoramic views of the Irish sea, that would allow her husband to do his office work outside during the warmer months, and provide a place for her grandchildren to play. She also wanted something that would give her the feeling of being in a treehouse.

Although I don’t imagine many people will have the space or time to take on a project like this, it shows off all the main features of ecological design extremely well. It provides an example of a small shed project (the children’s room), which is feasible in any small garden, and a larger open structure that would provide shelter with a minimum of materials.

Let’s take a quick tour. Entering the garden courtyard you are immediately struck by the drop from the house to the garden. Before the structure was built the only way to get to the garden was down a set of old concrete steps. These did not sit well with the rest of the garden.

The solution was to incorporate a new set of steps into the overall design, to take people from the house, through the stage area and down to the garden. The whole structure is made out of green oak, which means it has been used freshly cut. Green oak lasts for decades without artificial preservatives and is extremely strong. Other woods, such as hazel, become brittle within a few years and cannot be used for this sort of structure. Most manufactured and homemade sheds are made out of seasoned wood, timber that has been left to dry for at least a couple of years. Green oak has a high moisture content and dries in situ. This means it shrinks on the job so you have to allow for this process. The green oak used here was cut to order from Powys Castle and sawn locally but there are numerous suppliers around the country. The structure is held together with green oak pegs too.

The stairs are shaped inwards at the top to create a sense of being drawn towards the rest of the structure. Standing at the bottom, it almost feels like you are climbing into a painting by Escher.

The stage is a triumph of space saving and space enhancement. It is supported on four posts of green oak placed on four concrete pads. Because the load is borne by these four stilts there was no need to lay trenches for concrete foundations. This saved on labour, energy and materials. The stilts also freed up the space underneath the structure (for shade-loving plants, and a cool place to sit on very hot days). The structure itself is a vertical space for plants, with climbers trailing up to the roof. In a sunny, south-facing garden this is a perfect place to grow sun-loving fruits and maximise your home harvest.

Climbing to the top of the stairs you can turn left or right. Take the right turn and you come to the stage, but let’s take a little detour first. Stroll along the boardwalk under the clematis bower a moment and you’ll come to a small handmade wooden door. Open it and you enter the children’s playroom – a magical little space with a unique view of the garden through a square window. It’s made using a green oak frame and topped and sided with oak shingles cut by English company Carpenter Oak. To ensure

Ethical choice: the benefits of green oak