In the beginning... No garden for me, just a flat in South London with a shared patch of grass and a contract gardener who pruned the rose bush next to the garages. I never did get around to suggesting we did anything with it.
Instead, I found myself getting involved with Crystal Palace Park. We'd lived near it for years, and I fell in love with its decaying glamour, its Italian terraces, its Greek Statues, its Sphinx, its dinosaurs. Its a unique place.
But my involvement in the Friends of the park group was frustrating. Lovely people, but meetings about the future of the park were mired in past disagreements, and all the time I felt there was something more we could be doing. So in the end I stopped going to the meetings and started organising some volunteers.
We met in the park and got our hands dirty! Pulling up brambles, planting bulbs, pruning trees, painting fences, laying paths. We weren't meeting politicians or arguing about future strategy, but we could certainly turn to our handiwork and say, "I did that".
[About the photo: Shot at f/22 to get a nice sunburst. Even though I'd stripped off all the filters, I still got a bit of unwanted lens flare that I may get around to editing out at some stage. Hardest part was getting the position right so the sunburst was where I wanted it]
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