Trampled across, shat upon, dumped on. We let the wasteful abuse of these poor downtrodden sods carry on day after day. Most people are blind to it until they end up tripping up and only then realize what peculiar and ubiquitous little things they are. I’m talking about tree pits, those usually muddy, gravelly openings in our pavements from which a tree grows or perhaps used to grow. I urge you to show them compassion.
These little openings in our hard landscape are direct and public access to the earth and from that ground comes great potential. Their creation is almost always to serve the grander ambition of planting a tree. But this opening can be more than a conduit for a tree trunk. In the early years of a tree’s life the pit serves a crucial purpose in helping the tree take in water. Theoretically a protruding plastic tube or a pavement plughole should provide this, but how many times have you seen anyone re-fueling a tree with a thirst-quenching nozzle? Never I bet. Watering is left to nature and so it’s down to that tiny little tree pit to capture what it can and offer it up for what ever can grow within it. The tree relies on its pit for water until its roots have found other deeper sources of water.
The tree hugger in you will see now how vital a healthy tree pit is. At the very least don’t trample them, litter them or worse still, let your local authority fill them with that deceptively fancy looking resin-bonded gravel which only prevents the tree pit of providing any service it may provide, except as a dog toilet. Better than that, show the tree pit some active compassion. Clear the scrappy tangle of weeds, lightly fork over the soil so it can absorb more water, enrich the ground and in dry weather occasionally carry out a can and give it a really good soaking. Get comfortable with these PDAs and then get more expressive. Plant something joyful there. The open ground is your canvas. Let this tree pit show its potential! Around a mature tree plant daffodils, tulips, crocus, sunflowers, hollyhocks, petunias, cornflower, nasturtium, poppies, mint, marjoram - I’ve had them all flourish in tree pits by guerrilla gardening there, regardless of who should really be tending them. Gardening here is conspicuous compassion and like a wrist band or the red paper poppy it will mark you out to passers by as appreciative, conscious and grateful for the service the tree pit is providing. Get talking to them – I mean the passers by - win them round as compassionate gardeners. Together we can turn these the put upon tree pits into a network of micro parks.
Richard Reynolds is a faculty member of The School of Life, active Guerrilla Gardener and founder of www.guerrillagardening.org.
If you tend a pavement tree pit in London or know of a beautiful pavement garden then you might like to consider participating in the new Chelsea Fringe London garden festival this May and June. Please contact [email protected]
You’re so right, I couldn't have put it better myself. We have to look after our local tree pits, and make sure they have room to grow. But not only that, but have you seen what these vandals from the Council have been doing in our names, these so called expert tree surgeons cutting down absolutely healthy trees to make more room for traffic and other public works of civic-minded vandalism? Yes, of course you have. Many trees that are just seen to be in the way are literally cut to pieces every day by council tree killers and turned to sawdust. Why, only last summer they came along out of the blue and attacked a Victorian horse chestnut tree (one that I've known leaf and branch for all my life) in the road near my flat by the steps going down to the station, and completely cut it to pieces -- piecemeal. They just came up one day early in the morning with chain saws and attacked it. It didn't stand a chance, one day it was standing there in full leaf and the next all you had left was a six foot stump sticking out of the pavement. The next week it was gone entirely and all that was left was a pile of raw sawdust in the road. Lowlife thugs, I mean, these tree surgeons are, and who asked them to do it? Some pencil headed bloody-minded bureaucrat from the bowels of the Council's transport committee I suppose, probably getting nasty because of middle-aged marital strife or loss of libido or something. And this is happening every day in London, and yet nobody has the bloody guts to stand up to these Council thugs and put a stop to it. It'll all end in tears some day, and we'll have no old trees left to us, as they'll all have been turned to sawdust long ago. And this, I suppose is just only what we deserve, if only because we didn't have the decent sort of ordinary everyday courage to stand up and say no, simply for the fear that we'd be penalized in some low underhand way by the Council's bully-boys, or have the Council Tax doubled or something. But something else is also stopping us from kicking up a fuss here, from protecting Mother Nature in her direst need where it counts: where we live; it's simply that in our deep seated apathy in the modern world, we just can't be bloody bothered...and that, after all, is something that's probably going to finish us all off for good in a few dozen decades years anyway -- mark my words!
Posted by: Drew Byrne | November 08, 2011 at 09:01 PM