Dan McNeil's Blog

A while ago, I wrote a  post  about how we'd created a roof garden here in Wapping, London.  That was almost a year ago now, and so I thought it time to write a little more about what's been happening in the garden this year and what I've been up to in the garden over the past few weeks. Generally, this time of year is quite dull in the garden.  The tasks at hand are dead-heading and tidying and all the showy summer blooms are coming to an end.  We still have a few roses and fuschias putting in a last flash of colour, but the whole thing is starting to fade to green as autumn creeps on. A few things, such as the mixed tub of cornus and abelia above, as coming into their own at this time of year though.  The last few abelia flowers go wonderfully against the mixed foliage.  As autumn fades, the cornus leaves will fall, leaving the bright red stems which will see through the winter until growth starts again in the spring. Fuschias h...

Roof Gardening How we turned out back garden from this.. . ... to this... The basics Roof gardening has challenges over and above gardening on the ground. Not only does everything have to be grown in containers, but everything needs to stand on the roof of a building – and don’t forget that the roof of the building may be the floor of your garden but it’s also the ceiling of the people below. We are lucky enough to have some outdoor space with our flat in London, and we’ve spent the past few years turning a couple of empty, flat terraces into lush green gardens. Our front garden is a more traditional roof garden – Mediterranean trees in pots against the wall and a screen of bamboo to shelter delicate plants from the worst of the wind. This garden was already planted to some degree when we moved in, and our work has been to add to what was already there. The back garden was, as you can see from the photo above, literally an empty concret...