Making Garden Cities

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21640, 4 November 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

Making Garden Cities

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" When my Kentish friends heard me say I was off to Sheffield to lecture on Herbs, they groaned; so, to be frank, did I—less loudly." wrote Marion Cran in a recent article in The Queen. "The very word ' Sheffield ' conjured up the picture of a grimy smoke-bedevilled, congested industrial town; where men for their sins make knives, armour plate and cutting tools in .the extreme of discomfort, amid surroundings of great factories, rolling mills, power stations, research laboratories all the " fabric of a steel metropolis." The watchword of Sheffield is " quality," but if these great-hearted workers have won their title, and if Sheffield is beautiful in setting and in soul, " it is a city of smoke and noise and grime all the samel It seemed as if one could only be sarcastic with such a theme in such a town. I practically said as much during my first lecture, and was immediately persuaded to take notice of ' Brighter Sheffield.' 1 suspected a movement, and was not far wrong, but it is a movement very much .vested in tho personality of one enthusiast, whose voice, praising gardens, is raised tirelessly in season and out of season (if such exists in the world of flowers). Mr. J. C. Lockwood (' Tommy ' for short) is the kind of man every congested area should have; he is au apostle, a voice in two wilderness; a man of flaming energy and enterprise who is utterly and sincerely a lover of the soil.

spread from home to home like the ripples of a pebblo cast into a pool. "His garden is open to the public free at intervals. ' There were 1350 people through yesterday,' he told me, ' and though there are no places for litter I only found two bits of chocolate paper!"

" But he finds other things, and we went together to see some of them. Ho finds cigarette tins nailed against walls of houses in mean streets, filled with a sticky clay, watered every day, though there are no drainage holes, and in them daisy roots, dandelions or bluebells, most unhappily planted. "They learn!"- ha said cheerfully; ' they learn in the best way, by their mistakes! They learn from the ground upwards-;, the desire to grow something has started. Next it is wooden boxes; they find out something has been wrong and they ask, and watch. They sponge tho leaves; they sow little patches of grass and cut it with scissors; they spray! They cover boxes of plants with fish-netting to keep cats away. They fill old disused ingot moulds and earthenware furnace flues and pipes with earth to grow nasturtiums, sweet peas, scarlet runners up the steel smelters' shops and other parts of the factories. They g;o out on bicycles and bring back sacks of earth. , . Sometimes one finds wonderful grass plots in a back vard. . .

" Yes, I could imagine it. . . and the fish-netting to keep off the pussycats who also yearn for some sweet green usages. . . wholesome grass blades to gnaw, and clean- delicious earth to scratch in—the poor, defrauded cats. And the pathetic striving humans reaching out their hands blindlly from the reek and fog of ' civilisation ' to the good earth, man's lawful heritage. It is not so dreadful to be poor in the country; at any rate there are sweet airs to breathe, the birds to watch and to hear, the touch of living green abont a body, the sense of oneness with universal growth. The soul can breathe in the country—but these congested cities."

"In a none-too-large space he has made a beautiful, really beautiful garden full of colour, fine in form, and excellently cultivated. In the midst of it all is this dynamo of a man who is the ' cultivator ' type of garden-lover; a man who burns to prove to all fainthearts what can be done for beauty in a city of soot and smoke.

" And he has proved it abundantly. I have seen the effect of one good garden in a dull town before now: the influence