Green city: Expats offer inspiration on urban gardens
If your back garden or terrace looks as bleak in the summer as it does in the winter, buy a few pots and some seeds, suggest expat city gardeners
‘All you need is a windowsill’
Take Allan Howard, who’s convinced you can grow veggies no matter where you live. Before settling in Brussels in 1998, Howard, from Glasgow, spent six years in the Middle East, setting up permaculture projects in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
“Palestinians have so much appreciation for what they grow,” he says, “and it’s the perfect place to grow plants because of the wonderful sunshine.”
The weather in Brussels, he adds, is much less forgiving. “The soil is wet, the climate humid, and we also have a problem with slugs and snails.” Still, he doesn’t let that deter him from cultivating the plot of land behind his house.
Where does your garden grow?
Tucked away in a sleepy street near Flagey, the garden boasts tomatoes and cucumbers, alongside beans, courgettes and peppers. This year, he’s also trying out onions and leeks.
“I’ve always been interested in what you can grow in very limited spaces,” he says. “People assume that a garden has to lie flat on the ground, but tomatoes, cucumbers and beans – they grow upwards.”
Howard has created different levels, “so I can have three separate layers. The top level is for beans, below that I have tomatoes and cucumbers, and on the raised bed on the ground, peppers and lettuce.”
The hardest thing is to take the first step
In the far corner of the yard sits a compost bin filled with food waste that Howard uses to replenish the soil. He gets his seeds in the post from an organic supplier in the UK and a nursery in East Flanders and spends about an hour each day tending the plants.
“The hardest thing is to take the first step from never having done any gardening, to just doing it,” he says. “It’s like with children: Give them beans to grow in a plastic box, and they actually want to nurture them and protect them. It’s amazing when that happens. And suddenly you realise that gardening is not that difficult. All you need is some seeds, a container and a windowsill.”
Elsewhere in the city, Joseph Ingenito is getting ready to visit one of his clients. The American moved to Brussels in 2006, having previously worked for a San Francisco non-profit that converted empty spaces into community gardens.
His first job in Belgium was for a landscape architect, who specialised in designing gardens for wealthy people all around Europe. But Ingenito found it frustrating. “I thought to myself, why can’t an average person have a nice and affordable garden, even if they lack the space? That’s why I started my own thing.”
Connection with nature
To get to his first project, he rented a car and borrowed some tools. Word of mouth spread fast, and soon Urban Gardens was a full-fledged business. The vast majority of his clients are expats.
He creates gardens, he says, using a layering effect, “mixing larger plants with smaller ones in different-sized pots to create this sort of mini landscape. That’s the most effective way to use small spaces.”
Among his most challenging designs was a garden for a small windowsill. “I planted vines on both sides of the window and put some plants on the sill. The whole thing looks like a vignette of a forest.”
One of his favourites plants is the amelanchier, a tree that flowers in the spring, has green leaves throughout the summer and colourful ones in the autumn. For a year-round display, he recommends investing in an evergreen shrub, like the Japanese pieris.
“A garden creates that connection with nature, which we often lack in cities,” he says. “When it starts to blossom, you know spring is just around the corner.”
