How To Whip A Paving Stone
The only gentle kind of whipping
Interesting article about greening gardens:
‘We need to accept the weeds’: the Dutch ‘tile whipping’ contest seeking to restore greenery
In the Netherlands tegelwippen is “tile whipping”, or “whipping away” the paving stones.
“A lot of people think that tiles are easier, but actually when you have larger trees, you get very few weeds underneath them and you can make it really easy,” she says. “When I had paving I would never sit here, but now it’s a garden, it’s cooler in summer and in the spring, it’s lovely.”
This makes so much sense to me. In many towns and cities gardens have been paved over and tarmacked for drives and sterile stone. How can we reverse that? The Netherlands may be showing us the way.
A government that cared about the environment would have done something about this when the process began to accelerate in the 1990s. According to this article:
“The rush to cover front gardens in concrete started in 1995 when the government allowed householders to ‘cross over’ the pavement to park on front gardens, if they had one. That simple change in planning regulations kick-started the rapid conversion of the nation’s front gardens into car parks.”
The Netherlands idea strikes me as an excellent start. More extreme options might be reversing that law so that cars can’t park on or cross pavements, meaning gardens had to become gardens again. Or maybe any house sold which had paving instead of a garden would have an additional fee for the seller, with the money used to create a fund that could replant lost gardens. I don’t know, I’m just thinking aloud here. But first we have to get rid of politicians who only care about their pockets.
As I wrote about the other day, my garden is hugely important to me. It’s a place of food. It’s a place to see wildlife. It’s a place to collect kindling. It’s a place of refuge. It’s a place to connect to nature. It’s a place to drink a beer and play my guitar and sing (badly).
Some other articles:
Promoted by Karl Drinkwater (Green Party) at The Gate, Keppoch Street, Cardiff CF24 3JW.
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