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When I was young I had an aunt living in Kent who had a little greenhouse in her garden. She grew the most wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers in it. Green houses have long been popular with the gardeners of Britain, to keep the sharp east wind off their plants. Sometimes they had a little paraffin heater in them against frost, but for light and water they just relied on the sun and an outdoor tap. Half a century later, we've come a long way. It looks as if all the salad in Britain may soon be grown hydroponically in a form of super-greenhouse. Techno-lettuces, you might say?

During WWII the UK government had to cope with the problem of feeding a population of nearly 50 million people. Britain had depended for a long time on exchanging manufactured goods for food grown in other countries and there was no way that it could supply all its own food for that number of people. Every schoolchild knows about the heroic solution. It worked, but we may be facing a similar situation again soon. We still rely on imported food, and if our supply of imported food were to be interrupted for some reason, it would be far more difficult today. The UK population is now nearly 70 million and there just isn’t enough spare land. An enormous amount of what used to be farmland is now covered by a creeping sprawl of homes, offices, factories, roads etc. If our supply networks were interrupted we would have a serious problem. And these things can happen very quickly.

The favoured solution at present appears to be vertical farming, a form of indoor farming. Vertical farming means growing vegetables in giant greenhouses, not only outdoors on land usually farmed by traditional methods, but in places such as disused mines and tunnels, underground car parks, shipping containers, or on the roofs of buildings. The plants are grown stacked on shelves one above the other, or in towers, so that there is a massive crop from a very small footprint. Orkney is an agricultural area with centuries of experience in growing plants adapted to a difficult climate. Even here, the local college is working on a vertical farm project to avoid the difficulties of importing fresh fruit and veg to a remote storm-lashed island with a short growing season and hardly any daylight for several months per year.

Instead of using sunlight, the vegetables use artificial light from LED lamps. They are usually grown using hydroponic or aeroponic techniques rather than soil. The plants may have their roots in an inert substance such as perlite, with a water-based solution carrying all the nutrients they need running through it (hydroponics). Alternatively, they may have their roots growing down into a container where they grow unsupported but are periodically sprayed with a fine mist of water carrying the nutrients (aeroponics). There is even a method called aquaponics, where growing vegetables hydroponically is combined with farming fish. The waste water from the fish tanks is passed to the vegetables, providing them with nutrients, and then, having been purified by the plants, passed back to the fish.

These methods give complete control over light, temperature, humidity, and water, the vital things needed for plants to grow. Pollination of flowers such as courgettes or aubergines is done artificially as well. (What is the future for the pollinating insects I wonder?) This is known as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). The use of LEDS means that you can supply the exact spectrum of light which a particular plant needs at a particular stage of its growth. These greenhouses use less water than a conventional farm, up to 95% less, because it can be recycled. They create less pollution than conventional farms because everything is done by electricity rather than tractors belching diesel fumes, although that of course depends on how the electricity is produced. There is far less need for pesticides and you don’t have to weed them. (Or worry about slugs.) The technology can constantly monitor how the systems are functioning, for example the pH of the nutrient fluid, the temperature and humidity of the surrounding atmosphere, and how well the plants are growing. Labour costs are kept to a minimum, because much of the process can be automated and controlled by computers (you may not consider that an advantage, if you are having trouble finding a job).  They are independent of the weather outside – gales, droughts, unseasonal snowstorms are no problem.  And you can grow food in cities so that it is close to consumers and food miles are low.

 In other words, you can grow large amounts of vegetables all year round, unaffected by bad weather, in a very small footprint, close to consumers and with fewer sources of environmental pollution, in a sophisticated form of greenhouse.  Sounds perfect.

Well, not quite. Some varieties of crops are more suitable for these techniques than others. Leafy greens such as lettuce, kale and spinach are easy, so are things like strawberries, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. But you can’t live on lettuce, and root vegetables are more difficult. However, it looks as if it might be possible to grow some of the staple carbohydrate crops this way.  Apparently potatoes are a possibility, although at present this is not considered commercially viable in the UK. Japan is experimenting successfully with growing rice hydroponically in vertical farms in disused warehouses. Rice is also being trialled in India. Barley is currently being grown hydroponically, although the articles I have seen focus on growing fodder for animals rather than humans. It can be grown very quickly using minimal amounts of water. I read about a fascinating project developed by refugees in the desert in western Algeria, with help from the World Food Program and Oxfam. These people are victims of desertification due to climate change. Unfortunately, climate change causes some people’s farmland to flood, in other places it becomes desert. They have been growing barley shoots hydroponically as fodder for their traditional sheep and goats.

There are some commonly-acknowledged drawbacks. These systems are expensive to set up, since they require a lot of specialised equipment,  for example LED grow-lights, or pumps for the nutrient fluids. You need ventilation and constant monitoring of the atmosphere to make sure that moulds won’t grow and there is enough CO2 for plant growth, which means electronic sensors and computers to analyse the results and make the adjustments. All this complicated equipment needs constant maintenance. It requires quite a lot of technical expertise in a variety of fields to set up and run an indoor farm successfully. And as it is a new technology, it is constantly changing and farmers or farming business have to keep on upgrading. Anybody who gets frustrated by the constant upgrades on their laptop will know all about this problem.

Doubts have been cast on how commercially viable they can be because of the large amount of electricity required. Renewable sources such as solar power are used, but power outages can be disastrous – a whole crop can be lost in minutes. Usually a back-up source is installed. The same goes for water. Even if the farm uses a system where water can be recycled it is usually necessary to top it up from time to time. There seems to be some confusion about plant pests. Although they are said to need far fewer pesticides, I have also read that waterborne diseases can spread very quickly, and tiny pests like aphids and thrips came become a problem.

Above all, there are possible supply chain problems for the technology. For example, there are firms based in the UK which make grow-lights. But when you search for what materials are needed to manufacture grow-lights, it would take several pages to describe them. And among them are rare earth minerals, 98% of which currently come from China. Other sources are being developed or “acquired”. But it seems to me that vertical farming merely moves the danger from supply chain problems one stage further on, from problems importing lettuces to problems importing the equipment to grow lettuces. A contribution from high-tech farming may be necessary to feed a massively oversized population, but we should remember that it isn’t in any sense a panacea.

And when I look out over the fields in Orkney and watch the wind creating moiré patterns across the fields of golden-brown barley, or watch a farmer ploughing a field with a flock of seagulls swooping and diving behind his tractor as it turns the earth, or even, when I smell the slurry that wafts throughout Orkney when the farmers spray the muck from their cowsheds onto the fields, I can only hope that conventional farming won’t disappear completely. Somehow I feel safer buying my food from a farmer who has at least some personal contact with the land and the seasons, rather than a businessman who considers raising crops a matter of computers, nutrient fluids and LEDs.

It’s early December, and a grey lid of cloud hangs over the Orkney Islands, alternately disgorging rain and sleet. Occasionally the clouds part and the extremely low angle of the sun results in the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen. Waves break across the Churchill Barriers, driven by sixty-mile-an-hour gusts. We only have daylight for six hours a day. What can you expect at 59 degrees north? In my vegetable garden, most plants have died back for the winter. The slugs have gnawed my Christmas potatoes down to the ground, and only my leeks, watercress and parsley are bravely holding out. Perhaps it’s a good time to visit, in imagination at least, the veggie patches of somewhere warmer and lighter. And I thought of babai, the Giant Swamp Taro, growing in the coral atolls of the Pacific.

When I was a little girl, nurtured on Robert Louis Stevenson* and RM Ballantyne**, I used to imagine living on the classic coral island. The sun always shone: on the equator, there is no winter dark and cold. White sandy beaches were lapped by the brilliant blue waves of the lagoon and fringed by waving green coconut palms. Coconuts dropped from the trees and tasty fish swam into your hands. Around the lagoon lay a reef of shimmering white coral, with a string of tiny low-lying islets rising just above the waves. The beaches on the outside of the reef were open to the vast Pacific Ocean. The only sounds were the rustling of the palm fronds and the breakers crashing and foaming against the reef…

I was recently re-reading an old favourite of mine, ‘A Pattern of Islands’, by Arthur Grimble***, describing his experiences as a colonial officer  in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, in the early 20^th century.  A second book in my personal library about these islands is ‘Atoll Holiday’, written by Nancy Phelan****, after she spent a long holiday in the Gilbert Islands in 1956. These islands were a British Protectorate from 1892 until 1916, and then a British colony until 1976, when they became two separate colonies. In 1978 the Gilbert Islands became independent, as the republic of Kiribati, and the Ellice Islands remained British, now called Tuvalu.

Kiribati lies in the central Pacific Ocean, and consists of 32 tiny atolls and one raised coral island, strung out across the equator. ‘Atoll’ is the name for a roughly circular coral reef, with or without islets, surrounding a central lagoon.  Atolls only occur in the warm tropical and subtropical seas where coral can grow. There are various theories about how they develop their characteristic shape, but the most popular seems to be that the coral formed around an extinct volcano which subsequently eroded away.

Daydreams apart, these islands are not the best place for growing vegetables. They are made of coral and have no stone. They also have very little, very poor, soil. Grimble, writing of his arrival in the Gilbert Islands in 1914, describes in heartrending detail how attempts to make compost for growing the sort of vegetables he was used to were foiled by the speed at which it eroded away. He wanted beans and tomatoes. He got coconuts. The islands are short of water too. Water comes from rainfall which forms a convex ‘freshwater lens’ between the ground surface and the lower layers of coral which are permeated with salt water from the surrounding ocean.  The little islets are usually only a few hundred metres across, from ocean to lagoon, so plants also have to be salt-tolerant. Most of Kiribati is only two metres above sea level.

Between them, Grimble and Phelan described a selection of vegetable foods which came mainly from trees.  There were coconuts: green and ripe, both nuts and milk, and the sweet sap known as toddy which was collected from the palm blossom. It can be drunk fresh, or fermented into an alcoholic drink. Toddy was collected every day by men climbing up the coconut palms, and Phelan explained that it contains many nutrients which complement a diet of mainly fish and coconut.  Pandanus fruit, breadfruit, banana and an occasional pawpaw or pumpkin were also mentioned.

The main vegetable grown by the islanders which wasn’t a tree, apart from occasional pumpkins, was a plant known as ‘babai’.  This is the local name for Cyrtosperma merkusii or giant swamp taro, a plant native to the islands and an important part of their culture. Babai has dark green arrow-shaped leaves, huge succulent stalks and flowers a bit like an arum lily. It can grow up to 6m tall, with leaves up to 2m long by over a metre wide. The starchy corm (the swollen base of the stem) can be nearly a metre in diameter and weigh 80-100kg. It can be stored for long periods in the ground, or sun-dried and stored, so it is a useful resource for times of shortage.

Both Grimble and Phelan talk about babai being grown in deep muddy pits with compost added, each plant wrapped round in a straw cage. The pits are muddy because they are dug into the level of the freshwater lens, and their size varies from a few square metres to over a quarter of a hectare.

Babai has to be properly processed to get rid of toxins but it is very nutritious and in the early 20^th century it was an important part of the local diet. Grimble refers to it being mashed with butter, or steamed. He found it indigestible. Phelan also found it very heavy (page 179), except when it was mixed with other ingredients. She was presented with a pudding called ‘buatoro’ which she thought very pleasant. It was made by grating the babai, mixing it with coconut cream and with a syrup called kamaimai which was rather like golden syrup and was made by boiling down toddy. The pudding was cooked in a leaf wrapper.  It does sound rather nice, if a bit heavy, rather like my father’s golden syrup steamed pudding.

Alas, in the 21^st century, although giant swamp taro is still quite widely grown, islanders have apparently largely switched from their traditional diet to buying wheat bread, rice and sugar with the proceeds from the copra trade. It may be more convenient in the short term, but the resulting health problems are causing serious concern.

And the legendary coral island with its shining sands, coconut palms and babai growing in muddy pits may soon be nothing more than a memory. The rising sea levels associated with global warming are threatening babai cultivation as the fresh water lens is being contaminated by sea water, and extreme high tides lead to salt water spilling over into the pits. Many Pacific island groups are preparing to migrate to other countries, as entire islands are in danger of being submerged. They are, after all, only 2m above sea level.

* ‘Treasure Island’, 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson

**‘The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean’, 1857 R. M. Ballantyne.

***‘A Pattern of Islands’, 1952 Arthur Grimble

****‘Atoll Holiday’, 1958 Nancy Phelan

This year (2025), I spent my summer holiday down south. While I was in London, a friend, knowing that my current historical interest is the 18^th century, took me to see two 18^th century houses administered by English Heritage. The one that particularly caught my fancy was Marble Hill House, a small Palladian villa in Twickenham. It’s a little gem. The proportions of the house are so beautiful, that it didn’t really matter that the original contents were sold with the house in 1824, and that most of the furniture, pictures etc. displayed there today have been replaced from other sources. Nor did it matter that the gardens are still in process of restoration, and the lawns at the front and back were burnt brown by the heat wave this year, because the setting on the north bank of the Thames is so lovely.

Marble Hill House* was a villa built on what was then the outskirts of London, so that its owner, attached to the royal court, could enjoy fresh country air and scenery from time to time. Henrietta Howard was a Woman of the Bedchamber to Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II. Henrietta was also George's mistress, both before and for some time after he succeeded his father as King of England and Elector of Hanover. The villa was in the neo-Palladian style, popular in Britain from the early to the mid-18^th century. This was based on the work of Andrea Palladio, a 16^th century Italian architect. He was inspired by the work of the Roman architect Vitruvius and by the proportion and ornament used in the buildings of ancient Rome. Neo-Palladian buildings were symmetrical, one side being a mirror image of the other. They often had fronts similar to a classical temple, with a triangular pediment over the main entrance, supported by columns or pilasters, and large tripartite Venetian windows (a central large arched window with smaller rectangular windows either side). The principles of Palladianism could be applied to small houses as well as to what were virtually palaces. While the exteriors of the buildings were simple and plain, the interiors, which also contained classical features, might be richly decorated. The houses usually had gardens carefully designed to complement them.

Marble Hill is a small square symmetrical building with four floors. It has five bays across the front and three across the side; the centre three bays on the north front project slightly. The north front faced the road and originally had a forecourt; this was where visitors arrived by carriage. It has a triangular pediment supported by four pilasters with simple Ionic capitals. The south front has no pilasters but is very similar. It faces the river (visitors might arrive by boat) and overlooked the garden. The garden included a flower garden, a greenhouse, a grotto, a bowling alley, and an ice house; also lawns, woods and walks. On the east side there was originally an L-shaped service wing which no longer exists.

The interior had some lovely features. I can't go into detail about all of them, but the ground floor included a hall which opened onto the south front and was based on the Roman atrium. This was the entry to a Roman house, open to the sky in the centre with a square pool for rainwater below the opening. This pool is represented at Marble Hill by four columns surrounding a square marked by floor tiles in the centre of the room. A beautifully-carved mahogany staircase (unfortunately, the mahogany was probably the result of slave-labour) leads up to the first floor where the most important rooms were located. In the ‘Great Room’, music, dancing and other entertainments took place. Henrietta Howard was known to be a very intelligent, well-educated and cultured woman and she had a wide circle of talented friends. The large marble fireplace in the Great Room, with its classical decoration, is really beautiful. Her bedroom, which was also decorated with columns and pilasters, would have been open to visitors when she had guests, although this was where she normally slept and dressed. The second floor, as well as three more bedrooms, contains a non-Palladian feature, the gallery, which stretches from the north to the south sides of the house. Galleries were traditional in English houses, providing display space for paintings and other art objects, and a place to exercise in bad weather.  The final floor was the attics, probably where servants slept. A stone staircase connected all four floors and was used mainly by servants.  The contents of the house, either recorded or on display, illustrate the interests and pursuits of the English aristocracy in the 18^th century – excellent paintings on the walls; tea-drinking and collections of porcelain used for serving it; elaborate dining; chinoiserie – there is a fine lacquer screen in the Great Room.

London was by far the largest city in Britain during the 18^th century, the location of Parliament and the royal court. So what was going on in the rest of the country, while royal courtiers built Palladian retreats along the Thames and collected Chinese porcelain? What about Scotland, united with England since 1707? Just over 500 miles to the north of London, Orkney and Shetland did not host a royal court, none of the 18^th century monarchs ever paid a visit, and there was no resident aristocracy. George Douglas, 13^th earl of Morton, who was earl of Orkney and Lord of Zetland, did not live there. But the much smaller houses built by the local gentry (lairds) in the 18^th century often had Palladian features and were expensively furnished. Unfortunately it isn't possible for the public to visit either of the following two examples at the moment, but they are well-documented.

The Hall of Clestrain in Orphir, Orkney, was built in 1768 by Patrick Honeyman, the laird of Graemsay. This estate was the largest in Orkney after the bishopric and earldom estates. Although small, the house is in the Palladian style and said to be ‘of exceptional quality’.  It was a square stone building, symmetrical in design, linked to low pavilions at each side by connecting walls (only one survives).These pavilions are usually drawn in two-dimensional reconstructions as if they were level with the front elevation of the house, but in fact they were level with the back and formed two sides of a courtyard of which the rear, north wall of the house formed the third. There are three bays to each elevation and three floors, if you include the attic and basement floors. Probably the reception rooms were on the middle floor, with bedrooms above and service/family rooms in the basement, reached via an internal stone staircase. Entrance to the house was by a graceful stair into the middle floor through the projecting central bay, which was probably topped by a pediment. It faces south, and had a walled garden, like most gentry houses in the Northern Isles. The laird’s family later moved to the mainland of Scotland and left the Hall of Clestrain to their factor or agent. This was John Rae, whose son, also John Rae, was the famous Arctic explorer. The house is a category A listed building. It had become derelict, although many important Georgian interior details apparently survive.  The building is now in process of restoration with a view to opening it to the public.

The 18^th century lairds** of Orkney were known as the ‘Merchant Lairds’ since they used  the goods such as grain, butter and kelp, which were paid to them as rent by their tenants, for trading purposes and became wealthy on the profits. They also benefited from rent paid in the form of free labour, useful in the kelp industry. Kelp was one of the most profitable commodities in the 18^th century. It was an alkaline product made by burning seaweed in pits on the beaches, and Patrick Honeyman was engaged in the kelp trade. A 1764 inventory made when another wealthy laird, James Baikie, 6^th Laird of Tankerness, died, listed expensive household goods: walnut and mahogany furniture, gilded mirrors, brass candlesticks, clocks, writing desks, and easy chairs. There was table ware of silver, pewter, delftware and stoneware, and large stores of linen napkins and tablecloths. The cellars held 10 gross of wine bottles and 14 ale casks. Robert Baikie, the 7^th laird, owned a fine library, paid for out of his kelp profits. It is reasonable to suppose that the Hall of Clestrain was furnished in similar style.

And at the farthest northern point of the British Isles, the island of Unst in Shetland, a small Palladian house was built in 1775 by Thomas Mouat of Garth, the son of a laird. Belmont House, now a Category A listed building with an important garden, was occupied until the mid-20^th century, when the family sold it and it fell into serious disrepair. It was restored over the years between 1996 and 2010 by local groups, and is now in private ownership. Like Marble Hill, it has a lovely view, facing south over an inlet of the sea dividing Unst from Yell.  It is two storeys high, with attics and basements, and two pavilions at the sides linked to it by connecting walls which surrounded the forecourt. To the north at the back of the house was a farmhouse. To the south were three walled gardens and a park, and an avenue leading down to the shore. Many of the garden features such as walls, remains of a summerhouse, footpaths etc. are still visible. It sounds absolutely lovely.

Perhaps Hall of Clestrain and Belmont House are not large enough to count as ‘stately homes’, but they are beautiful examples of a particularly graceful style of architecture which spread from south to north of the British Isles in the 18th century.

*Marble Hill English Heritage Guidebook 2023 Dr Megan Leyland & Emily Parker;

** Profit Not Loss The Story of the Baikies of Tankerness 2003 Bryce Wilson

When I first heard about Hügelkultur, I thought it was the most extraordinary method of growing vegetables I had ever come across, although a useful idea if your problem is not enough depth of soil.  But as I recently scanned idly through many a screen, my eye was caught by a reference to floating vegetable gardens. It brought back a very vague memory of my first-year university studies. Fifty-five years ago, when I was doing my degree in prehistory, we had to start by looking at an overview of the prehistory and (some of) the history of the whole world. I remembered hearing about the floating vegetable gardens of the Aztecs, a useful idea if your problem is growing food for a city surrounded by water.

The Aztec empire flourished in central Mexico during the 14^th, 15^th and early 16^th centuries CE. Their capital city was Tenochtitlan, built on islands in Lake Texcoco, now the site of Mexico City.  They were a warlike people, but their science, art and architecture were also impressive; they had a written language, and an interesting if somewhat bloodthirsty belief system. The Aztecs kept track of the year using two separate calendars, one for ritual and one for agricultural purposes, which together formed a 52-year cycle. The Central American civilizations did not use wheels except for spindle whorls and children’s’ toys. They had neither potter’s wheels nor wheeled vehicles, perhaps because of the terrain or the lack of suitable draft animals.  They also didn’t have guns, so their sophisticated society was brought to an end by the arrival of foreign invaders, the Spanish Conquistadors, who did.

The Aztecs were migrants to the Valley of Mexico from the north. When they arrived there in the early 14^th century the area was already inhabited. Their capital was built on a small island in a swamp because this site was uninhabited and easily defended.  As the population grew, the chinampas were their solution to providing the city with food. Chinampas were not really floating gardens. They were artificial islands, created by building wattle fences on the lake bed to create small square enclosures which were then filled in with dredged-up lake mud, brush and waterweeds from the surrounding waterways, all rich in organic material. Trees, especially willows, were planted around the edges of the islets to increase stability, and the surrounding waterways were kept clear, allowing canoes to pass among the gardens, and maintaining a constant supply of water to the gardens. The fertile soil thus produced was extremely productive.  The Aztec farmers grew, among other vegetables and herbs, maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, chilli peppers and amaranth (a plant which produces tiny nutritious seeds which can be used like cereal grains). 

Chinampas did not compete very well with modern industrial methods of farming and global trade, and gradually almost ceased cultivation. They recently became important again in supplying Mexico City with fresh food during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Suddenly markets were closed, borders were closed and supply chains all over the world were disrupted. Surviving chinampas became the best source of fresh vegetables for the population of Mexico City (now 20 million people). They have been suggested as a good example of sustainable agriculture. And the chinampas of Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, are today recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

The term ‘floating vegetable garden’ is often used rather loosely to signify a vegetable plot, man-made or otherwise, surrounded by water. The chinampas are not actually floating. The island of Madeira is sometimes referred to as a ‘floating garden’ because of its lush vegetation. In France, the Hortillonages are a labyrinth of tiny islets accessible only by a network of canals, which once supplied the town of Amiens with fruit and vegetables.  However, there are parts of the world today where vegetables are actually grown on floating constructions made of locally-available plant material.

In the Indian sub-continent, there are farmers who cultivate vegetable gardens that are free-floating. The practice was traditional in Bangladesh in areas which are often flooded for long periods during the monsoon. The long thin vegetable beds are constructed on a base of water hyacinth stems, bamboo, and rice stalks, beaten into mats and covered with silt, chopped water hyacinth, manure, and soil. The beds are anchored in place with bamboo poles but can rise and fall with changing water levels. The vegetables best suited to these floating gardens, which are usually around half a metre thick, are shallow-rooted leafy greens such as spinach, amaranth, beans, okra, tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, gourds, and herbs such as mint, ginger and coriander.  They can be up to 55m long, although shorter lengths are commoner; usually 10 – 15m long by 1m wide. Unlike the chinampas, they last for months rather than centuries, and need to be rebuilt every flood season.

The beds are cheap and easy to build, very fertile, and as they gradually decompose, produce excellent compost. They are considered to increase food security in areas prone to disastrous floods, and also something which gives status and economic benefits to women, who often do the cultivation. Furthermore, water hyacinth* is a highly invasive species from South America, which needs to be cleared from waterways anyway, as it interferes with fishing and water transport and allows mosquitos to breed, so this is an added benefit.  Bangladesh is very low-lying and is likely to be seriously affected by climate change and rising sea-levels, so floating vegetable gardens may become even more useful in the future.

Floating vegetable gardens are also used in parts of India, such as Dal Lake. Dal Lake is a large shallow freshwater lake in the city of Srinagar, Kashmir, in India. The lake is a noted tourist attraction, with a beautiful setting in the Himalayas, lined with gardens, parks and boulevards, and dotted with houseboats. Its floating vegetable gardens supply the city with fresh food. Reeds and bulrushes are woven together to make large mats which are dried out for several years before being covered with a layer of mud and planted with vegetables. These gardens can be moved around to various parts of the lake. Another kind is built on the marshy edges of the lake and is not moved, although it still floats. These gardens can be up to 2m in thickness, and can grow root crops such as carrots, turnips and radishes, as well as the same vegetables grown in Bangladesh: tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, aubergines, beans, gourds, chillies, melons and pumpkins and herbs. They can be 45m in length, and 3m wide. Unfortunately, the gardens are currently badly affected by climate change, pollution, tourism, and reduction in the area and depth of the lake. Government policies of resettling the farmers elsewhere, and the reluctance of younger people to work for the low profit margins involved also threaten the survival of this form of cultivation on Dal Lake.

Other countries in Southeast Asia, such as Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar, which have a tradition of houses built on stilts over a lake, also use floating gardens. Further afield, I have found a reference to floating vegetable patches in Southern Sudan.

All of the floating gardens described above are simple to build and are constructed of locally available materials. They are cultivated using organic methods, basically lake mud and animal dung rather than industrially-produced fertiliser.  They can provide a living for landless farmers, and empower village women, who can do much of the work. They usually supply food to a nearby city, so they are distributed locally and food miles are minimal. But cultivating a garden while up to your waist in water and mud, and the low profit margins involved, are not to the taste of many young people today. Floating gardens are labour-intensive – you can’t use a tractor or a harvesting machine on a raft. Pollution from sewage and industrial waste is becoming a problem in many areas. It takes extreme poverty, or a crisis such as the Covid pandemic or serious flooding to make them an attractive option in the modern world. But one day, we may need to think again.

* Incidentally, the sale of water hyacinth is now prohibited in the UK, and although it is not illegal to have some in a garden pond, releasing it into the wild is strictly forbidden. It does not usually grow well here because it does not tolerate winter temperatures below freezing, but has been noticed thriving in a Nottinghamshire park. Shall we think about global warming at this point….?

“From the bank of the Tweed to St Andrews I have never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present century. Now and then about a gentleman’s house stands a small plantation, which in Scots is called a policy, but of these there are few, and these few all very young. The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness…”

This bleak landscape was described by Samuel Johnson in the 18^th century in his “A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland” 1775 (p.8). At the end of the Ice Age, Scotland was largely covered with temperate forest, but a change to a cooler wetter climate and the effects of agriculture, as well as felling trees for timber, charcoal, etc. deforested much of the country. The same is true for the Orkney Islands. It is believed that most of the woodland in Orkney had been cut down by the end of the Bronze Age to clear land for farming. Grazing by animals and the strong winds for which Orkney is famous prevented regeneration.  By the medieval period, Orkney, and Scotland as a whole, were importing timber for building houses, ships, vehicles etc. from Norway.

In Orkney, a tiny patch of native woodland survives at Berriedale on the island of Hoy, together with a few even tinier scraps in the same part of that island, such as Burn of Quoy, mentioned in Stromness Museum's ‘Woodland Walks'. The main native trees in Orkney are Downy Birch; hazel; aspen; rowan; various willow species: Grey willow, Eared willow, Tea-leaved willow, Dwarf willow, Creeping willow and juniper. Wild rose and wild honeysuckle form part of the understorey.

There are a few small plantations of trees around the gentry houses (early modern onwards) in Orkney, perhaps what Johnson meant by a ‘policy’. They are usually sheltered by stone walls. These trees are mostly sycamores, a native of central, eastern and southern Europe, which is believed to have been introduced into Britain either by the Romans or during the Tudor period. Sycamore does well in Orkney because of its tolerance of the salt-laden winds. Although it’s a real nuisance if your garden is anywhere near a sycamore tree because it produces quantities of winged seeds that germinate vigorously anywhere they land.

Several small areas of conifers were planted by the Forestry Commission on Hoy in 1954, as part of a government program for re-afforestation of suitable areas. This program especially favoured species useful for timber, such as the fast-growing Sitka spruce. According to MTT Philips, one of the foresters who worked on the this project, there were four small plantations at Fea, Lodge, White Glen and Lyrawa. Looking at the OS map, there seems to be a fifth, at the extreme north end of the island, called Hoy Forest. The small plantations are mostly still standing,  although the only one I am able to get close to, at Fea, has suffered quite a lot of wind damage around the edges.

More recently, there have been more efforts to plant small areas of mixed trees in Orkney rather than coniferous plantations. Orkney Islands Council, various community projects, and a number of private individuals have done so. I visited a very good one during the Open Garden Festival this year, Laura’s Wood in South Ronaldsay. Several of my friends, who have large enough gardens, have raised quite successful mini-woods within a few decades, although they don't tend to use all-native species. Usually fast-growing willows are used as a windbreak to start them off. I understand that the tiny saplings may need to have wire netting collars to protect them from rabbits.

In urban areas of the Scottish mainland, ‘Tiny Forests’, or ‘Wee Forests’ as they are now called in Scotland, are being established using the Miyawaki method. Akira Miyawaki was a Japanese botanist and plant ecologist, who developed a method for growing very small areas of forest very rapidly. The Miyawaki method of creating tiny forests involves careful preparation of an area of soil, usually about the size of a tennis court, (approximately 24 x 11 metres) and then planting native species of trees from the normal canopy layer, lower storey and forest floor, all at the same time. The seeds are planted at very high densities. This is supposed to replicate what happens in a natural forest when a canopy tree falls and opens up a clearing. Competition for the light means that the saplings all grow very fast, competing for light, and natural selection thins out the forest. It apparently results in a tiny area of dense woodland, a native forest in miniature, and it only takes decades rather than centuries. It is very important to plant species which are native to the area – even within the UK, there are variations in habitat.

The small size (you can make them as small as 5m²) makes them suitable for small areas of waste ground in densely populated urban environments, where they have a noticeable effect on temperatures and air quality. The ‘tiny forests’ also provide opportunities for children and adult volunteers in big cities to learn about forests, while providing free labour for things like watering and weeding while the seedlings grow big enough to fend for themselves. And they attract sponsorship from businesses, who can use them for corporate away-days and bonding sessions and so on. An organisation called Earthwatch is co-ordinating the planting of many of these ‘wee forests’ in Scotland. There is one in our nearest large urban centre, Aberdeen, Woodside Wee Forest.

Lockdown generated a lot of social media advice about how important it is for our mental health to connect regularly with nature, how beneficial ‘forest bathing’ is and so on.  But it’s getting more and more difficult to find any forest to bathe in. This planet is grossly overpopulated. These tiny patches of woodland can never offer the silence and solitude of a real forest, nor the atmosphere which generated folk stories of witches and wolves and beautiful princesses sleeping for centuries in enchanted castles. You cannot be alone in the same way with the silence, the solitude, the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the tall trees far above, the rustling of small animals in the undergrowth. They do not seem to be places where you can just wander; you need a clipboard or an organised project. But perhaps they can cool down our mega-cities and give our grandchildren something to look at instead of concrete. Which can’t be bad.