The Armchair Environmentalist

Extract from the chapter on Gardening

If you’re a gardening novice - a virgin when it comes to planting methods and pest control - let’s start with some of the basics about the lovely, lush, living things we call plants. Proper experienced gardeners divide garden plants into all sorts of categories: perennials and annuals, herbaceous and woody, complicated things we didn’t worry about here. The good news is that all of them have simple needs: water, air, and sunshine. Given half a chance, they will grow and thrive. They want to live long enough to reproduce, which is why they produce flowers and fruit. Our aims and theirs usually coincide, you see, so the trepidation people sometimes feel about gardening just isn’t necessary.

Gardening is one of the best de-stressors around because it gets us to tune in to the rhythms and signals of the natural world. That is, as long as we don’t start a cycle of endless drives to the garden center and subsequent frantic ‘getting things in.’ Keep it simple. Gardening is about nurture. It’s creative, like water-colour painting in three dimensions, and it will calm your spirit and focus your mind.

If you’re totally new to gardening, here are two little projects to show the wonderful vigor of plant life.
Cut an extra-thick slice from the top of five or six carrots, a good inch or so of green and orange. Place cut side down in a saucer, on a little gravel or sand if you have some handy, and add half an inch of water. Put the saucer on a windowsill, keep the water topped up, and wait. Soon you’ll see delicate fernlike leaves begin to unfold. I love this because the leaves are pretty (carrots are related to Queen Anne’s lace and other garden flowers) and because it’s such a great demonstration of the life force in even a tired bag of supermarket veg.

The second project will help you visualize what takes place beneath the soil when you actually get outside. And you’ll end up with a tasty, nutritious salad! You can sprout many different seeds, but I recommend ordinary green lentils. Soak a small teacupful in cool water overnight, drain in a sieve, then keep them in the sieve (you can also buy a special sprouting jar) and rinse them with cool water twice a day. Cover with a cloth or keep them in a dark place, and watch what happens! A tiny pale root tip will appear on the first day. When the roots are as long as lentil is across, rinse again and toss with vinaigrette and chopped onion and celery. Raisins or cubes of cheese are nice, too. Lunch is served!
Armchair Environmentalist