The wisdom of a gardener.

Monty Don was on the BBC 5 Live Simon Mayo show today, puffing his TV series Around the World in 80 Gardens. He’s the gardener I wish I could be: he looks like he’s been grown up a trellis, he has the patience and application to keep on top of the jobs, where as I am a neglect-and-blitzkrieg type of gardener. He’s also a thinker.

Go and get the Daily Mayo podcast for Friday. His comments about global warming and the role of society in surviving the interesting times ahead are a thought-provoking listen. He’s no climate scientist in this strict sense of the word, but he’s been gardening, intimately connected with soil, plants, the outdoors and the weather for many years. He said that in his opinion ‘the kaka has already hit the fan’, that we’re basically over the edge, we haven’t just starting going downhill very fast yet.

He posed the question what happens where the fuel isn’t there to ship food around the world, how resilient are our societies? (As one living in a village prone to power cuts not very, I can tell you. Stuff stops very quickly.) Nine days of snow could empty our supermarkets of food, and as someone once said, we’re only two missed meals from a society rioting.

The solution, he said, lay in communities cooperating rather than a retreat into individualism - more like wartime Britain when people ‘dug for victory‘:

and we were, co-incidentally, the best nourished we have ever been, rather than the fat idle fast food-fed fuckers we are rapidly degenerating into. That works in this Yorkshire village, fertile fields all around and the sea a mile away. London, eight million? Interesting times. And anyone writes a book called ‘the wisdom of a gardener’, (or any variations thereof) I want my slice, or I’ll be after you with me spade. And I’m descended from canal-digging Paddy navvies, so I swing a mean spade.