Best temp job in town: Pop-up gardens are appearing across London thanks to one pioneering enthusiast

The main focus is the trees. Apple, pear, quince, apricot, cherry, blueberry, blackberry, strawberry

By Emma Townshend
The Independent
August 22, 2010

Excerpt:

Trundling along to buy a lunchtime sandwich the other day, admiring the floral bedding in my local park in Ealing, I spotted a little sign: “Pop-up Kitchen garden”. Now, we’ve heard of pop-up shops, restaurants and art galleries, but a pop-up vegetable garden? Exploring a little further, I found that a set of kitchen garden beds, neatly edged in wood, had materialised out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous surprise.

And these pop-ups are catching on across London. While my local garden has already been dismantled, in Southwark you’ll find the Union Street Orchard until 19 September, full of 85 fruiting apple trees and serving cider. It’s “pop-up” because it’s created entirely on a concreted site by some railway arches on a quiet side road in SE1. But its orchardy qualities are beautifully on show: trees live in piles of tyres and pallets, bearing urban fruit.

Heather Ring was the enthusiast who initiated the project, taking on a commission for the London Festival of Architecture. As far as instant greening goes, she’s an old hand: I first came across her through her Wayward Plant Registry, a website that finds homes for abandoned plants. It asks people to fill in a form that reveals all kinds of things about their attitude to our little green friends. “I love the idea of finding homes for plants, and the orchard is an extension of that: we’ve found permanent homes for all the fruit trees on local Bankside estates,” she says.

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