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London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens is located just off a busy A road; buses thunder past at all times of day, while commuters pass on their walk to and from the Overground. With its original 1901 building and clock tower, it’s hard to miss. In fact, head of horticulture Errol Reuben Fernandes calls the entrance gardens their “shop window”. So, filling them with building waste might feel like a bold move.
But for Fernandes it makes perfect sense: so-called ‘rubble gardens’ offer an eco-friendly way to use discarded materials and create a perfect habitat for hardy, drought-resistant plants, something that’s becoming increasingly important as the climate shifts.
He also believes it can offer something beautiful too: “It was previously quite a monoculture; on one side of the path was Agapanthus, which were beautiful for maybe three weeks of the year, but the rest of the time not doing so much. And on the other side, you had bamboo and phormium; nice enough, but no flowers and no real multi-seasonal change.”
