This wasn’t intended but every autumn the Virginia Creeper makes beautiful outside curtains for our windows and every year it creeps a little higher. A few years ago this was the view from the kitchen, now it’s at the top of the house.
The birds like it too. All summer you can hear sparrows bickering among the leaves, showering the bench down below with grit – luckily nothing else has landed in my coffee yet. This is a kind of vertical garden, full of stuff that’s been erased from the horizontal by all those bloody parking plots for cars growing where plants used to be.
Vertical gardening: when the wind blows the ground is covered in a red carpet.
I really like the idea of a vertical garden. What do you think of parallel gardens? I’ve spotted a few unlikely ones in Edinburgh. The roof gardens on the Scottish Parliament and that new block for Edinburgh Council near Waverley Station has a living roof too. The ground might be wasted by tarmac but the roof has grass and plants and moss for birds and insects. Surprising but good eh?