If you’ve walked along Old Woolwich Road, opposite the garage and auction rooms, you will prabably have ‘zoned out’ the ghastly little strip of nothing that runs along the outside of Stone interiors’ yard. It’s been like it for years (though I do vaguely remember mosaic made from broken stone a few years ago – maybe ten? I could be mistaken…)

In the spirit of Guerilla gardening, though perhaps a tad more official, a few E.Greenwich residents have decided to do something about this dreary little strip of rubbish, dog-poo and fly-tippery, and make it into a micro-garden. Stone Interiors will be donating some stone to make it all nice…

Ian, who told me about the project, has got some local big-hitters to contribute – Greenwich Parks, the garden design course at the University and, of course, our own Mary Mills, and they’ve got to the initial design stage (personally I’d just build a raised bed and stick some flowers and a few veg in – but what do I know…)

If you’d like to be involved, the design workshop will be on the 22nd June, at the stone yard. The room they’ll be in only fits a limited number of people so if you fancy joining, let Ian know – either by emailing him on ian.worley@arkh.com or calling 077125 86923.

I have been noticing teeny-tiny gardens turning up all over the place in East Greenwich. My favourite is at Westcombe Park Station where, at the moment, there is a profusion of wild strawberry flowers, but later on will turn into what is essentially a herbaceous border. I don’t know who does it, but I tip my tricorn to the Ooompa-Loompas that come out in the dead of night and make little corners of Greenwich a little bit more beautiful.

I’ve been trying for a week to think what I could usefully add to the hours of TV, yards of newspaper comment and terrabites of bloggery/tweeting about the terrible events in Woolwich a week ago today and have come to the conclusion that there is nothing I can add that doesn’t reiterate what has already been said. That wouldn’t just deepen the pain of a family, a town and a country in mourning.

So instead I thought I’d share with you a little path I found at the weekend when visiting a pal who’s just moved into a new flat at the Woolwich Academy (next time I visit I’ll take some pics for you, there are some really interesting old buildings – and some very dull new ones…) Perhaps it can bring a little joy in sad times.

Basically, if you take your bus of choice to Queen Elizabeth Hospital then walk a little further along away from Woolwich, past the car park, you’ll find a little wooded entrance, leading to a path heading east. You can follow the path through the woods right up into open common, knee-high in cow parsley and feeling for all the world somewhere that could be in the middle of the countryside.

Nobody seems to use it. My friend and I had the whole common to ourselves – there wasn’t a kid playing with a kite, a bloke walking a dog, a teenager sniffing glue, nothing. Just us. And it was wonderful.

If you follow the path across it comes out just by the Academy, but there are other paths that criss-cross, so you can choose your own adventure.

There’s a rather alarming headline on this week’s New’s Shopper about the state of Woolwich Common after its moment in the spotlight last year at the Olympics.

I’m not for a moment pretending that LOCOG – or whoever their clean-up guys are – have not seriously neglected this area of the common. I guess it just goes to show that the major fuss individuals, groups and the council made about insisting Greenwich Park was put back properly was justified. With only the MOD to look after Woolwich Common there are parts of it that still look like ploughed fields.

I went over to take a look and while, frankly, the News Shopper is slighty exaggerating, it’s still much more of a mess than it should be.

But with all the awful stuff that has been going on in Woolwich I wanted to show that not everything is grim in the place. There is sweetness and peace to be found.

BTW if you click on the long thin image at the top you’ll see what a marvellous view there is to be had..

Anyone who reads this blog even occasionally will know that I’m a bit of a fan of Greenwich’s (sadly diminishing) tree population and am usually spending column pixels complaining about the loss of yet more mature specimens in the ever-increasing march by developers to cover every inch of the town in teeny-tiny concrete boxes.

So it’s rather refreshing to hear that someone’s planning to actually plant some trees. The London Parks & Green Spaces Forum have plans to plant 10,000 street trees across London and they’re currently talking to local groups (in this case the Greenwich Society) about where specicfically to do this.

I would love to see Greenwich getting her (do we think of Greenwich as a ‘her’ or a ‘his’? Hmmm….) share of the forestry, so today I’m asking for suggestions for public locations and streets where a few new trees wouldn’t go amiss. I’d love to see some of the varieties that get really big – much like the ones that are being removed just now (gnash, gnash…) but councils and utilities companies tend to put the kibosh on them. Frankly I’ll just settle for lovely native species.

I’ll pass your suggestions onto Franklin from the Greenwich Soc and local tree man Capability Bowes – though I suspect they’ll both be chipping-in anyway…

Haven’t had one of these for ages, so I thought I’d go with a parklet that looks much smaller than it actually is today.

It’s in the area just north of Maze Hill station, around Tyler Street/ Walnut Tree Road (which is bisected by it) and Columb Street and manages to encompass open grassland, mature trees and a kiddies playground in an area that in my memory at least is always teeny.

It’s clearly the result of bomb damage and what has always amazed me is that there is a park there at all; that the whole of it wasn’t just subsumed into new builds. I am sure it would be now.

I was curious to know just which bombs it might have been, so I enlisted the help of resident Phantom Blitz Expert, Stepen Hunnisett, who gave me a rundown of just how flattened the area had got by the end of World War II:

• 8/9/1940 (no time given) – Tyler Street/Trafalgar Row – High Explosive /Incendiary Bombs – Fire at Francis Campion’s premises
• 17/10/40 @ 16:58 – 16-18 Tyler Street – High Explosive Bomb – no casualties
• 10/01/41 @ 00:15 – Tyler Street – numerous Incendiary Bombs – no casualties
• 8/9/40 no time given – Maze Hill Station – Incendiary Bombs on line
• 9/9/40 no time given – 99 Maze Hill – Incendiary Bomb – fire in house
• 9/9/40 @ 23:11 – 111 Maze Hill – Incendiary Bomb – fire in house
• 9/9/40 @ 23:15 – Maze Hill Station – Incendiary Bomb on down line
• 17/10/40 @ 17:20 – 75 Maze Hill – High Explosive – no casualties
• 18/10/40 @ 23:59 – 139 Maze Hill – High Explosive – 1 walking casualty
• 18/10/40 @ 09:19 – Maze Hill Station – 2 Delayed Action Bombs discovered in Goods Yard
• 18/10/40 @ 10:12 – 37 Maze Hill – UXAA Shell
• 20/10/40 @ 22:50 – 139 Maze Hill (again) – High Explosive Bomb

Blimey – after that little lot it’s hardly surprising there’s so much post-war new-build. Of course they were aiming for (among other things) the railway line – and sometimes actually hit it – but it’s clear living round Maze Hill in 1940 was a dangerous occupation.

The area is still pretty darn cute (I’ve always loved Walnut Tree Road) but it must have been even cuter before 1940. Still – respect to whoever decided not to cover every single inch with what must have been much-needed housing and instead pay attention to the social needs of the people who were going to live in the new homes.

If you’d like to know more about wartime Greenwich and Blackheath, Stephen has two of his occasional Blitzwalks coming up. The first is this Sunday, May 19th,  at 11.00am, the second, unusually, on a Friday 28th June at 6.30 p.m.

Both walks meet outside All Saints Church, Blackheath Village, cost £9 per head and last 2 hours 45 minutes. You can pay on the day but pre-booking is strongly advised as they’re always popular, via the website.

At last it’s open. Yet another secret garden of Greenwich is revealed. I took these photos just a couple of weeks ago on the first official day of opening for what we must now call The Queen’s Orchard (formerly the Dwarf Orchard, which was, frankly comical) in the north-east corner of Greenwich Park, but anyone would have thought I took them a couple of months ago, so fit-to-burst were all the trees and flowers – this was probably the first day of ‘nice’ and since then it’s all gone mad, even if the weather’s still a bit iffy.

We’ve been watching – or rather not watching this project for years now. The tiny, secret sliver of land that even people who knew it was there forgot it was there. High walls, dense greenery and a quiet part of the park, lurking behind the kiddies’ playground, meant that we were intrigued, but left almost completely in the dark, save for a few grainy pics sent to me by kindly phantophiles living in Park Vista…

What we’re seeing here is the bare bones of what will be a stunning garden. Still pleasingly wild in parts, it’s like seeing a beautiful princess in her knickers, just before she puts on the gown to be the belle of the ball. Volunteers and park gardeners have cleared the ghastly sycamore weed-trees and thick undergrowth to reveal what was left of the little formal garden.

Sadly that’s very little – any landscaping is pretty much long-gone, though there is a fabulous (and very elderly) mulberry tree which, come to think of it, I didn’t see when I went a couple of weeks ago. I can’t believe it’s not there; I must have been too busy looking at everything else.

They have done a lovely job with the old well that was unearthed. Personally I preferred the first wrought iron well cover that artist Heather Burrell came up with but this one is very fine indeed and when it mellows in and stops looking quite so ‘new’ it’s going to be lovely.

In fact you could say that about pretty much all of the new park – it’s just very ‘new.’ The delightful rounded pond with its high, brick raised beds, the pristine ogee-shaped arches, still naked, the fabulous wooden railway-sleeper style raised veg beds – it all looks a bit clean and fresh – which is hardly a surprise given that it is.

Ditto the lovely wild bit with the re-planted dwarf fruit trees that gave the orchard its former name – they’re young, cute, local and with ancient ancestry but a bit on the stark side. Give it all a couple of years though and this is going to be one of my favourite corners of the park. In the meanwhile it’s a delight to be able to watch it develop.

The park is currently open between 1.00pm and 3.00pm on Sundays – though I found that to be a generous estimate – no one seemed to be in a hurry to chuck anyone out. The gardener I talked with told me that they’re planning to stretch the opening hours gradually throughout the coming months.

I need to go back now there are actual leaves on actual trees.

Okay – I know that sounds a bit dramatic, especially when I tell you that what I’m telling you to clear your diary for is a set of open gardens, but stay with me. I have my reasons. This is for all Greenwich lovers, gardeners or not.

St Alfege’s parishioners ran this project a couple of years ago, to raise funds for the ever-burgeoning restoration costs of a 300 year-old church. Over a couple of Sundays around a dozen gardens in West Greenwich were open to the public in exchange for cash (and not a lot of cash at that.)

As a fan of beautiful gardens and as even more of a fan of nosing around other people’s back gardens (why else do you think I run the Rear Window section?) I was in there like the proverbial Flynn – it was in Parish News – hopefully a few of you managed to make it too.

If you did you will know what I am speaking about. Each of the gardens is exquisite in its own way – and June is a wonderful time to see them. They range from the lavishly formal – a particular favourite is the Manor House at the top of Crooms Hill (see above) – and the exquisitely bijou (see the delightfully narrow, be-mirrored jewel at 27 Maidstone Hill, which comes complete with the fanciest chickens I’ve ever seen…) through to marvellous, unexpected jungles. I am deeply intrigued by one that opening this year described as “Dangerously steep and thorny terraced garden, entered at the visitor’s own risk”.

There is even genuine woodland – Westcombe Woodlands at Maze Hill will enjoy a rare opening – worth seeing for so many reasons – not least to nose around what all the fuss was over a few years ago. It’s also a real pleasure to enter as you have to go through someone’s garden, a secret, quietly-landscaped series of nooks, on several levels and a joy in itself.

There are so many brilliant gardens open I don’t have time to describe them all, but I promised something for all Greenwich lovers, gardeners or not. There is one house you MUST see.

Number 14 Crooms Hill is a gem in every single respect. As nutty as it is historic, as exuberant as it is lavish, as eccentric as it is joyful, as mysterious as it is ever so slightly creepy, this deceptively large confection leads out to a deceptively larger and delightfully unkempt back garden. I won’t even begin to try to describe Ann Broadbent’s extraordinary home – I will just say that if you don’t go on one of her tours of the house you will sincerely regret it later. This is an example of Greenwich at its secretive best. Go. Just go.

Sold yet? Then scrawl Sundays 2 and 9th June, 2-5pm in your diaries. You’ll need both dates as different places are open on each day.

Break open your piggy banks to get the money required – a whopping £3 per garden or £10 for the lot on a single day. Just pay the tenner. I’m telling you now, you’ll need to see them all – pay at the first garden you visit. It’s worth bringing a bit more money too, as there’s tea and cake to be had at some venues.

I have forgotten how to attach PDFs (well, okay, I wrote down the instructions wrong) so I’m going to copy the details here for you, with the descriptions by the owners in italics.

Seriously – you need to go to this one…

Sunday 2nd June:

1. Tim and Patricia Barnes, The White House, Crooms Hill, SE10 8HH TEAS

A walled garden laid out when the house belonged to the Astronomer Royal. Lots of climbers, good-sized lawn and flowers planted in a rather haphazard but hopefully cottagey way. And a mulberry tree as old as the house.

2. Ian and Susan Pawlby, 22 West Grove Lane, SE10 8QP WINE

Come and explore a hidden garden in a hidden lane.

3. Jane Custance Baker and Peter Gingold, 51 Hyde Vale, SE10 8QQ

Dangerously steep and thorny terraced garden entered at the visitor’s own risk. Designed to be viewed from the house, the owner and inept gardener will do house tours to show the exceptionally varied and challenging site from different (and safe) vantage points.

4. Ann Broadbent, 14 Crooms Hill, SE10 8ER

A very large and peaceful garden, it contains nothing much except wonderful mature trees including a plane as big as the ones in Berkeley Square. Tours of the house, which is much more interesting, are also on offer.

5. Susan and Jimmy Gaston, 119 Maze Hill, SE10 8XQ TEAS

North-east facing garden lying under Vanbrugh Castle; raised beds with shrubs, a pergola covered in Albertine and Brides Veil roses, and a beautiful dovecote as the centre piece.

6. Alan Bartlett and Simon Gallie, 27 Maidenstone Hill, SE10 8SY TEAS

This narrow hillside garden forms part of Point Hill and features some of Alan’s RHS medal-winning garden items as well as his chickens. There are many unusual plants in the garden. Due to the many steps, slopes and limited accessibility of this garden, it may not be suitable for people requiring walking assistance.

7. Westcombe Woodlands, Lasseter Place (off Vanbrugh Hill), SE3 7UX

A contrast to other gardens, this is mature woodland, hidden away from the public eye, but recently improved to be a better wildlife habitat. There are wild bulbs and newly-planted fruit trees, but today there is simply access to a small clearing and a winding path with nest and bat boxes – and views towards Canary Wharf.

Sunday 9th June:

1. Clare and Mark Hatcher, 41 Gloucester Circus, SE10 8RY PIMMS

A walled garden in a late Georgian terrace, the garden comprises formal elements with herbaceous borders, a beech hedge and a woodland garden under a horse chestnut tree.

2. Penny and David Matheson, 30 Hyde Vale, SE10 8QH PIMMS

The garden of an 1830s tea-caddy house with a lawn in front and, behind, two shallow flower-filled terrace beds backed by rose-covered arches through which one sees a round lawn surrounded by a stone path and banks of shrubs, ivy and large trees.

3. Teresa and Jonathan Sumption, The Manor House, Crooms Hill, SE10 8HG

A large garden standing on the edge of the hill comprising two small formal gardens, a flower garden surrounded by trellis and pleached apple trees divided by a parterre of lavender, and a sunken garden with a geometrical box parterre planted with herbs.

4. Caroline and Richard Newton Price, 3 Hyde Vale, SE10 8QQ TEAS

New garden, old garden, tea and cake.

5. Geoff and Paula Nuttall, 124 King George Street, SE10 8PX

A small, south-facing walled garden that can be entered by a side gate.

6. John and Helene Mitchell, 4 Orchard Drive, SE3 0QP

Views from the house (wisteria and jasmine) and rear terrace (camellias) lead, via the croquet lawn and yew hedge, to the orchard (apples, pears, plums and quince) and a wild area (silver birch, oak and walnut).

Lovely, isn’t it. Shame it isn’t an oak.

Reading between the lines, it seems to me that the crime this beautiful Copper Maple tree that shades the garden at The British Oak has committed is that it isn’t – well, a British Oak. The landlord has applied for permission to fell it, claiming that “The foliage canopy covers the whole seating area of the garden allowing no light into it”. 

Thing is, judging from this photo, taken at 3.00pm last Monday afternoon, that just patently isn’t true. The seating area is clearly in plain sun. His other claim is that the tree attracts pigeons and squirrels, which upset the customers.

NEWSFLASH: Phantom Towers has a surfeit of pigeons and squirrels too, which is quite incredible, since I am not aware of a Copper Maple anywhere nearby.

Peter tells me that far from being ‘upset’, the customers he sees seem to enjoy the wildlife – and even feed them, which probably has rather more of an alluring effect than a tree.

The landlord intends to replace it with a ‘suitable specimen’ but, um, hang on, wouldn’t a sapling eventually have the same shady, pigeony, squirrel-magnet effect as a mature tree? And if he’s hoping to replace it with a British Oak sapling, he’s in trouble – they don’t exist (and the Oak varieties that do exist get BIIIIIIG).

It’s true that maintenance can be pricey – and the pruning that’s been done in the past has been of the somewhat crude variety, which makes it worse in the long run, but this is an important tree in a lovely garden that would be the poorer without it.

Indeed, Peter reckons it’s “one of the most significant trees in The Rectory Field Conservation area and has been loved by generations of users of the British Oak and is fully deserving of a Tree Preservation Order to protect it until a more sympathetic custodian takes over the Pub. This tree requires careful and responsible husbandry when it will continue to bring pleasure and be a valuable environmental asset. For many its loss would be a local tragedy.”

If you agree (or even if you don’t) by all means comment here, but though I will be delighted to know someone reads the blog I can’t guarantee that those comments will actually get to the person who can make a difference.

The email I gave out for Debi Rogers, the Tree Officer, is bouncing back, so my best suggestion for being able to comment is to go to the link at the top of the post and make a public comment there. The reference is 13/1006/TC British Oak, 109 Old Dover Road, SE38SU - and you don’t have long – you need to do it by Tuesday 21st. May 2013.

Everywhere I look we are losing our mature trees – mainly in streets and new developments, to be replaced by pathetic, weedy excuses for trees because they’re less bother. I still mourn the loss of the fabulous limes at what we must now call Greenwich Square. Greenwich – and the entire country is the poorer without them, and I believe that we have got to the stage where each individual needs to be fought for.

Moving on from the dreariness of yesterday’s post about what’s happening to Lovell’s Wharf now, something a little cheerier. This fabulous photograph was sent to me my Hilary Peters, who long-term Phantophiles will know was the one-woman driving force behind saving the stunning buildings along Ballast Quay (where the Harbourmaster’s Office is, next to the Cutty Sark) and the creation of the cutest garden in Greenwich.

She has been writing a history of Ballast Quay, which I am dying to read, and I won’t have long to wait, as she’ll be selling copies on a special open garden day in June.

Put the 8th and 9th June in your diaries, folks – and get the chance to walk through that usually-locked gate (and meet the wonderful Hilary…)

So I finally know a little more about the little parklet we were wondering about a few weeks ago, starting with its name – yes, I didn’t even know that.

It’s called The Dell and in case you don’t know where it is, here’s a map. It’s just at the bottom of the gardens at Mycenae House and Woodlands, but isn’t connected to either – any more. I love it because, apart from, perhaps, the odd grass-cut,  it doesn’t appear to be ‘managed’ – the gates are just left ajar for anyone who wants a little peace and quiet.

I guess the fact that I didn’t know the name of the baby parklet contributed to my not finding it in Neil Rhind’s Blackheath Village and Environs II, so thanks are due to local fountain of knowledge Julian Watson who was able to pinpoint it for me.

And yes, of course the land used to be part of John Julius Angerstein’s Woodlands and remained so fairly late – it wasn’t until the mid-1920s that the Little Sisters of the Assumption, who’d taken over Woodlands sold it off, something for which I can only forgive them because they built a grotto in the bit of back garden they kept. I’ve always found it somewhat harder to forgive Greenwich Council for knocking said folly down.  Aw, c’mon – demolishing a grotto is the architectural equivalent of kicking a puppy.

As an aside – it’s very easy to digress when you’re reading Blackheath Village and Environs – I note that around the turn of the 20th Century a chap called Felix Bell tried to build a hotel on the junction of Beaconsfield, Mycenae and Humber Roads. A petition was drafted, which 515 out of the 538 residents signed. The hotel was eventually not built because someone pointed out that Westcombe Park is a dry estate – not an alcoholic drink to be got anywhere (shhh – don’t tell the two Indian restaurants…) and that if Mr Bell built his hotel his guests wouldn’t be able to enjoy a drink.

But back to the Dell. That particular bit of Woodlands was used for the garden of Fairfax House, on Beaconsfield Road (where the flats are now.) It was a large Tudor-style building, built in the 1880s, that enjoyed a succession of curious owners, including a Mayor of Greenwich, Ernest Dence, who evidently snapped up the land the cash-strapped Little Sisters were flogging to fund their novitiate house.

Dence installed a boating lake and throughout the 20s and 30s used the garden for charity garden parties, ‘private theatricals’ and a craze that swept Greenwich during that time, pageants where everyone wore fancy dress (one was Tudor themed to reflect the no-doubt accurate architecture of the house.) It appears to have been compulsory for at least one wag to fall in the lake at every event.

For anyone knowing the history of the area, it’s not going to be too difficult to guess what happened next. Fairfax House was, as is traditional round here, bombed to buggery and in 1952 the flats that are there now were begun.

The Dell, perhaps surprisingly, escaped development, and became what it is today – sans boating lake, sans fundraising toffs and, save for small children on October 31, sans fancy dress. According to Neil Rhind, nothing actually remains that was planted that time – all the trees, save one, the old oak, are younger – and the oak itself is probably older even than the house. But I’m happy for it to stay as a little secret garden that everyone can enjoy, look for the marks where the lake was, and dream a little of nutty 1920s pageants…

Mycenae Road

I have been fascinated by this little corner of land for as long as I’ve realised that it exists. You could be mistaken for assuming that it belongs to Mycenae House or, more probably, Woodlands, and no doubt at some point it did. But this little walled piece of woodland, with its gates just left ajar for walkers or dog owners to slip through (and scrump some blackberries this time of year) is separate to the main buildings.

I am told it’s called The Dell and that it was indeed part of Angerstein’s garden at Woodlands. There was originally a pond there; the outline still exists even though it is dry now. Julian Watson, who told me its name, has never known why it became separated from the garden, whether it happened when LBG acquired Woodlands or whether it was earlier in the days when Woodlands was a convent, though reckons it should be easy to work out by looking at a sequence of maps.

I wonder how it became public – and why…