GARDEN makeover
Rob Slade has turned his concrete London plot into a container garden that’s ALL ABUZZ
AFTER
BEFORE
When this now-vibrant Walthamstow plot won Rob Slade’s heart four years ago, it was nothing more than a desert of hard landscaping. But quite by chance, Rob discovered a love of all things wild and now happily curates a blooming lovely home for generations of garden critters.
“It’s a traditional city garden, basically a very standard rectangle,” he explains. “When I moved into the house in May 2019 with my partner Anthony Baxter, it was a big paved block. I’d always had a thing for houseplants, but never spent much time thinking about the garden. But I decided to sow some seeds and got completely hooked – how magical that huge cosmos flowers can grow from something so tiny, and with my help! It was so rewarding! Then to see people, hoverflies, bees and beetles all getting the same joy from the flowers was a lovely feeling.”
As more and more critters came to visit, Rob’s enthusiasm soared. “Seeing bugs and food chains form was really exciting. When I first saw aphids I was horrified, but then I realised they bring the ladybugs. And those in turn get gobbled up by the birds.
“One day I was out there on my lunch break with my dog Yolk. We were lying on the floor and staring up at the bees playing in and out of the campanula flowers, and I noticed one of them was different. Turns out we’d managed to attract a bee-fly. Without my garden I would never have found out I even shared the planet with this species!”
WILDLIFE HAVEN
And Rob wanted more. He and Anthony had got to work with a heavy-duty hammer to remove a huge three-tier pond made of concrete, stagnant and filled with mosquitoes. With the space cleared, it was time to add new decking and a potting shed/garden room, nicknamed ‘Bobbie’s Hobbie Barn’.
Not shy of admitting he doesn’t fully know his way around a trowel, Rob happily says his gardening technique is more experimental than expert. Take a look at his Instagram page (@TheTerracedGarden) and you’ll find a no-holds-barred account of his non-green-fingered adventures – some successful and pretty, others disastrous and ‘rank’! Yet he’s still managed to grow some fabulous plants and flowers in his modest 45m2 garden, one container at a time.
Having lovingly embraced the circle of life in his outside space, Rob lives in harmony with a cornucopia of wildlife. He actively encourages the bees to help themselves to the tasty juices of his calendula, can’t help a cheeky grin when blue tits fight over his fat balls, regularly ‘gifts’ hostas to the snails and, when cute but pesky bushy-tailed bandits ra
