My resolution? DITCH THE PLASTIC!
It’s revolutionised gardening, but now it’s time we all cut back on the use of plastic for the sake of the environment, says Monty Don
THIS year has been a very full one in my garden, not least because we’ve been celebrating Gardeners’ World’s 50th anniversary, so I’ve been looking back and taking stock of how the world has changed over the past 50 years.
I was 12 in 1967 and have clear memories of that summer of Sgt Pepper, love-ins and going to see the cricket.
More pertinently, I can remember our garden and the old prewar mower still in use, the wooden seed trays and the old greenhouse heated with coke in the Victorian boiler in the little shed at the end. I recall the hours spent sieving leafmould to make compost for the chrysanthemums that we grew in the new lean-to unheated greenhouse my father made, the chrysanths being planted after the tomatoes had been taken up.
I remember the white alyssum and pelargonium cuttings that had been raised in the heated greenhouse being brought up from the bottom of the garden in an old wooden wheelbarrow and planted out as bedding by the front door and I remember the hours spent clipping edges, hedges and banks with heavy, wooden-handled shears.
The thing that strikes me most about that litany is how much wood was involved and how little plastic.
Plastic has increasingly crept into every corner of our lives over the past half century and that affects us in the garden as much as anywhere else. This has had both good and bad impacts.
The good is the democratisation of gardening. Until plastic pots became ubiquitous, most plants were sold bare root and not in a container. This meant they had to be ordered in advance from a catalogue, delivered when convenient for the grower, which was usually autumn, and planted as soon as they arrived or else heeled in (temporarily covered in soil). None of this is essentially a bad thing but it took planning, time and some trouble. When plastic pots became widespread, plants could be displayed, sold and transported in a lightweight, inexpensive container. They could be bought and planted at any time of year and the delay between seeing a plant, buying it and having it growing in your own garden could be one of hours rather than months.
Now all seed trays, plant plugs, pots and commercial containers of every kind are plastic. Potting compost, peat, grit and vermiculite all come in plastic bags. I confess that for the past few years the mushroom compost that we buy in to mulch the borders, which used to be delivered by the ten-ton lorry load, now comes in bags on pallets. The garden is now wrapped in many layers of plastic. This may have made our lives more convenient but it is an environmental disaster. Plastic takes hundreds of years to biodegrade. Every time we use and discard any item of plastic we are adding to the mountain. The oceans are already clogged with plastic, both as visible material wrapping itself around fish and birds and being eaten because they look like fish, and as micro plastic eaten by plankton and then worked up the food chain.
So I would suggest the overwhelming goal for the next 50 years for gardeners around the world is to reduce and if possible stop all use of plastic. This will not be easy. It will involve rethinking how we do things rather than just going without or returning to the methods of half a century ago. No one can change everything – but everyone can change something. And if our generation does nothing then we’re merely piling up a growing problem for our children and grandchildren to deal with.
So I wish you all a very happy gardening year in 2018 and let’s all resolve to find ways that we can cut back on the plastic in our gardens.