Newnham Permaculture Garden

The way to the secret garden is through a pale blue gate in the brick garden wall of an imposing Victorian house (dubbed the Pightle); through a passageway of forsythia and lilac and across the big back lawn (watch out for badger worm dig-holes) occupied only by a garden shed and some scattered lawn furniture and banks of tall, dark trees full of birdsong; through a stand of brush and hedge under which badgers have dug their elaborate sett and are sleeping somewhere underfoot[1]; and beyond this hedge are the plots of once-fallow ground claimed for now by enterprising, green-hearted Newnhamites, who have built and sprouted a community of gardens. First labor of love: the allotment beds for Fellows and students, and on the neighboring square, the subject of this post: the Newnham Garden Club’s new permaculture garden.

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This past winter, wanting to apprentice myself to gardeners and spend time in gardens, I joined the Newnham Garden Club’s group chat. Newnham’s head gardener, Lottie, had told me about the Garden Club’s plan to create a permaculture garden on an unused plot of land in a tucked away corner of the college with funding from the college’s 150^th Anniversary initiative. These plans were just now coming to fruition. The club members had spent their winter holidays reading up on permaculture—that is, “permanent agriculture,” gardening design inspired by ecology, “working with, rather than against nature”[2]—and talking over garden designs on Zoom. Now, most of them were stuck at home after the sudden descent of lockdown during the holidays, but seasons don’t wait for Covid restrictions to ease. So I was invited to meet with Lottie and the only other Garden Club member currently in residence, Lily, who was fortunately also one of the spearheaders of the project (or “keen bean” as she called herself/us). It was down to us to start making things happen on the lumpy spread of lawn hidden behind hedges and out-of-the-way college buildings before spring planting time arrived.

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We met at the site to get the lay of the land, since, as Lily told me, permaculture is all about maximizing the natural features of a garden site. We noted where the sun angled through the stand of field maples (and how this would change come summer and with leafing out), which shady spots would be good for rhubarb, what patch would take a forest garden, where the nearest water source was (some water butts in the neighboring allotment garden), where there might be room for a teahouse, where the big old cedar with hazardously spreading limbs would have to be felled, where the badger holes encroach on the path, where the mounds of dumped earth from the sunken rose garden in the college were left to grow over with grass and nettles. In the center of the lawn Lily was envisioning concentric rings of raised beds built from layers of logs, branches, grass turfs, leaves, soil, compost—this is hügelkultur, another facet to add to permaculture, which discourages tilling and digging and instead allows beds to retain their nutrients and moisture. And on those beds, an array of vegetable abundance.

During that first surveying meeting, my attention was drawn aside by petal-like seeds drifting quietly from somewhere mysterious in the cold air, by the crow calling from high in the condemned cedar, by the half-frozen dew on the grass mounds, and the idea of the badger sett riddling the ground beneath us. Lottie’s and Lily’s plans were inspiring—and really, this full, quiet space was all I needed to keep me coming back.

We decided to start building one pie-slice of the hügelkultur beds in the part of the lawn clear of where the cedar would be felled. Lily marked out the circles with sticks and logs (and later, less permaculturish, with spraypaint) and we made the first cuts into the tangled turf with our spades, jumping on them to slice a few inches down and lifting out squares of soil and grass where the log layer would go. It was hard work—roots, flints, and matted grass often resisted our spades—but it was methodical and physical, a nice change from sitting at a computer. As I’m wont to do, I paused often for cedar cones flaking into amber chips, the soaking savory smell of wild garlic, flints sheared into translucent gray or left whole, knobbly and umber; fat worms overturned in the soil; the angel choir of forsythia blooms and song thrushes in the trees. We celebrated the satisfaction of turfs coming up cleanly, or feeling through the roots and creepy crawlies underneath; dirt dried under my nails until I got some gloves.

Over the course of a few weeks we built up the mounds, puzzling together logs and branches left from clearances in other parts of the garden, layering on the turfs we had cut, and wheelbarrowing and shoveling loads of leaves, dirt, and compost that the garden crew hauled over from the college garden’s heaps. (It’s been a tremendous help to have access to an entire college garden’s resources and occasionally the crew themselves—this would have been a different project otherwise.)

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One day we also planted a small orchard at one end of the site—a forest garden, with gooseberry bushes and strawberry plants interspersed between the trees. I planted a pear tree; according to my memory, it’s the first tree I’ve ever planted. The Principal of Newnham had just planted a pine sapling (Pinus pinea, stone pine) to mark the beginning of a 150-tree planting project to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the college, and also to keep the number of conifers in the garden unchanged once the cedar came down.

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While we waited for the weather to warm up and the cedar tree to come down, we planted seeds in trays on our windowsills and the college greenhouses. I had some spindly lettuce and thriving peas climbing my window; meanwhile Lily and others managed to plant out a whole garden’s worth of lettuce, tomatoes, beans, peas, herbs, and radishes in the greenhouses. I stopped by to help occasionally, relishing the moist green warmth in the old glasshouses, the musty darkness of the potting shed, and the jumble of long-accumulated gardening curiosities and plants draping every corner.

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One day in April while cutting hazel branches from the back of the college garden to use as bean poles, we heard far-off chainsaws and knew the venerable old cedar’s time had come. The next time I went to the site it was permeated with the nose-opening scent of cedar and the tree was spread across the site in logs and sawdust; the biggest logs would soon be turned into planks and beams for our teahouse by an obliging woodworker and the rest would form the base of the remaining hügelkultur beds. The stump has since been chainsaw-carved into the charming shape of a sleeping badger by the woodworker.

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By then, more Garden Club members had returned to college and we had many hands to make reasonably light work of filling out the rest of the beds—and to make new friends. Together we cut turfs, lugged logs, wheelbarrowed compost, and shoveled and shoveled. We saw the layers progress across the rings. The pear and plum saplings flowered.

We began bringing seedlings from the greenhouses over in wheelbarrows overflowing with green and hardening them off in their pots in the center of the circle. Before long they were going into the beds. In went tomatoes, basil, marigolds, lettuce and more lettuce, corn, dill, kale, carrot seeds. We built a teepee of hazel branches in the center and planted the peas and beans at its base. We lugged watering can after watering can over the beds and the trees. We watched for evidence of badger incursions, but haven’t seen more than a few paw-scrapes–though once we saw mysterious dimples all over a new bed which someone determined to be the rollicking pawprints of fox cubs.

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Now the circles of plants are coming into their own, flush with leaves of all different heights and shades, tomatoes growing up their woodsy hazel teepees, and cheerful symmetry ringing around the beds. I went to visit the garden the other day and found a few members of the garden crew there, having just planted some leftover vegetables from the college vegetable garden—rows of jewel-toned lettuce and white-flowered plants called garden huckleberry (which we eventually figured out is sadly not remotely the same as the wild huckleberry that is the delicacy of northwest North America). These replaced some of the greens that have been nibbled down to the ribs by pigeons and other creatures–the way it goes in a garden like this. Netting over the remaining brassicas, greens, and corn will hopefully keep some for us. Gardening is always a learning process, continual trial and error, as the gardening gurus among us sagely remind us. It’s about trying things, building, adapting, and enjoying the plants and the company.

The harvest has only just begun.

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[1] a circumstance both charming and unfortunate as badgers like to dig in gardens for worms and eat tasty produce, but one we have to live with as UK badgers are protected and don’t take well to transplanting.

[2] Bill Mollison, Permaculture Two