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Ethical gardening advice and up to date information on green issues that matter to you.
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The Guardian | 17 August, 2010
The Scottish government yesterday revealed it is in talks with Norwegian energy giant Statoil about hosting the world's first floating windfarm at two potential sites off the Scottish coast.
The Independent | 16 August, 2010
The Prince of Wales is to embark on a tour of the UK next month, taking in Bristol when he will be joined by the Duchess of Cornwall, to champion examples of sustainable living.
The Telegraph | 16 August, 2010
Telegraph gardening expert, Helen Yemm gives topical tips and advice – from clematis to slugs!
The Independent | 15 August, 2010
There may be only a few hundred Dairy Shorthorn in Britain, but Tulip and other rare breeds of cattle, sheep and pig aren't just genetic dead-ends. As their impassioned owners explain, these beauties are the supermodels of animal husbandry – and, quite possibly, the saviours of the 21st-century farmyard.
The Reckless Gardener | 12 August, 2010
When the Moon is in a Fire constellation (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius), plant activity is concentrated mainly in the development of fruits and seeds. This is a good for growing tomatoes, French beans, peas, apples, raspberries, strawberries and cereals of all kinds (and for maintenance and planting seeds where appropriate).
Defra | 29 July, 2010
A £2million boost in funding to help local authorities deal with flood risk assessments was announced today by Environment Minister Richard Benyon as part of a package of measures to help prevent and manage future flooding.
The Telegraph | 27 July, 2010
Householders face a £300-a-year rise in their gas and electricity bills and significant cuts in how much energy they use if Britain is to “keep the lights on” and meet its climate change targets, the Government has said.
Natural England | 23 July, 2010
Consumers will help improve the long-term sustainability of the British countryside
A new source of grant funding will shortly be available to projects seeking to improve the sustainability of British farming and rural communities.
The Telegraph | 22 July, 2010
Ideas for for plants and shrubs to have in your garden that keep your bees busy and productive.
BBC | 22 July, 2010
The UK government is to stop funding the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), its independent environmental watchdog and advisory body.
Set up by the Labour government in 2000, the SDC is among a number of green bodies to be abolished.
Natural England | 17 July, 2010
Winners of the name a species competition announced. The British public choose common names for species with an identity crisis.
The competition invited the public to give popular names to ten species of British beetle, bees, jellyfish, shrimps and lichens, all of which are endangered and all of which have until now been listed only in Latin.
The Telegraph | 11 July, 2010
The Sunday Telegraph launches a new award which seeks to honour those whose gardening efforts touch the lives of others. It is dedicated to the memory of the writer Elspeth Thompson.
The Telegraph | 11 July, 2010
Gardeners are being urged to plant more flowers that bloom during the summer and mow their lawns less often as new research is revealing that honey bees have to travel further to find food at this time of year.
The Observer | 11 July, 2010
David de Rothschild set out on a mammoth ocean crossing aboard his recycled yacht to highlight pollution of Earth's waters – but even he was shocked by what he found.
The Independent on Sunday | 10 July, 2010
As head gardener at River Cottage HQ, Mark Diacono grows all kinds of things you can eat. But it's in his own backyard that he really branches out.
The Guardian | 9 July, 2010
One of Saddam Hussein's greatest acts of ecological destruction - the draining of the Mesopotamian marshes - has been reversed as birds and rivers return to the region.
Saddam Hussein's draining of the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq - recorded as the Garden of Eden in the Bible - was one of the most infamous outrages of his regime, leaving a vast area of once-teeming river delta a dry,
salt-encrusted desert, emptied of insects, birds and the people who lived on them.
The Reckless Gardener | 02 July, 2010
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has launched a nationwide initiative that will bring teachers, pupils and local adults together to develop school gardens.
BBC | 14 June, 2010
A report earlier this year suggested that the UK's music industry was responsible for about 540,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, also known as greenhouse gases.
Wednesday, June 16th - Sunday, June 20th
at the NEC Birmingham.
Telegraph Online | 05 June, 2010
The celebrity chef is partly responsible for the recent craze for grow-your-own as people follow his advice to eat more healthily. But few of his fans have enough land to grow fruit and vegetables. The latest figures show almost 200,000 keen gardeners are on waiting lists for allotments, with some set to wait 40 years.
The Independent| 03 June, 2010
The staggering gait, the mood swings and the headaches will be familiar to anyone who has indulged in a big night out. But in Australia's northernmost city it is not the people who are behaving like drunks, but the native parrots, which are falling out of the sky.
Telegraph Online | 29 May, 2010
Helpful hints on keeping chicken, protecting your veg from them and protecting them from foxes.
They are the perfect productive pets, they improve the compost no end and this year we have finally solved the matter of keeping them apart from the crops. Don't believe anyone who says you can keep hens and have a garden.
Telegraph Online | 28 May, 2010
Biodiversity and sustainability walk hand in hand and should find a special place in the hearts of organic gardeners.
Popular as they are, what do these words mean? The first place to look for an answer is in choosing what we grow. The wider the variety of plants we have in the garden, the greater the diversity of life, not just above ground, but beneath it too.
The Sunday Times | 23 May, 2010
The scandal of Britain’s dirty seas is revealed this weekend with evidence that raw sewage is being pumped up to five times a day into areas where holidaymakers swim and paddle. And the tag “the dirty man of Europe” looms again after Britain was ranked 18th out of 22 European countries for beach cleanliness.
The Guardian | 23 May, 2010
Should you peel off labels or rinse out cans? Where does used glass go? Take a few simple steps to better recycling.
The average British recycling rate is just 18% of the collective bin – a long way off the 50% required by 2020. Expect local authorities to turn up the heat. RFID chips have already been fitted to wheelie bins in 68 local authorities.
Waste Management World | 20 May, 2010
Further research by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) on the environmental benefits of recycling reaffirms its earlier conclusion that recycling generally remains the best option for most materials in the UK waste stream.
The Royal Horticultural Society
The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
BP could face criminal charges and ban on activities in US
As several coastal states declared a state of emergency and dispatched clean-up crews, BP was desperately trying to stem the flow of crude from its damaged offshore platform and to snuff out a growing political storm that has wiped billions of pounds off its share price.
EACH year, millions of people stack their garden bird feeders with seeds and nuts to help birds survive the winter. But as valuable as they are to many species, for a minority of songbirds in Europe and North America bird feeders appear to be a death trap.
Government scheme to protect ecology of Chagos Islands delights green movement, but exiled islanders will be kept away so that US can retain use of its airbase
Britain is to establish the biggest marine nature reserve in the world, centred on the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, announced last night.
Britain announced the creation of the world’s largest marine nature reserve yesterday in the pristine waters surrounding the Chagos Islands, a cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean.
Householders with small-scale green energy systems such as solar panels and micro-wind turbines will receive up to £1,000 a year for the electricity they generate under a new government scheme that starts paying out today.
Professor Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the centre of the scandal over the leak of sensitive emails from a university computer, has been largely exonerated by a powerful cross-party committee of MPs who said his scientific reputation remains intact.
Many people believe hedgehogs are ubiquitous in Britain, but in 2007 they were added to the Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), a document compiled by more than 500 British wildlife experts and one of the most-respected reference sources on endangered wildlife. Nowadays, their population in this country is estimated to be as low as one million.
Siemens will invest in excess of £80m to develop an offshore wind turbine production facility in the UK.”With the new wind turbine production plant in the UK we’re pushing ahead with our strategy of investments in attractive growth markets for eco-friendly technology.
In the foreseeable future the wind power market in the UK will be characterized by major offshore projects, and we’ll extend our market leadership with the new production plant,” said Peter Löscher, President and CEO of Siemens AG.
Volunteers are well on their way to rescuing over 40,000 toads from death on the UK’s roads, setting a new record. The action is being coordinated to highlight to planners and highways authorities that roads need to be made more amphibian-friendly, to stop toads from undergoing further local extinctions in the UK.
As the fiscal dust kicked up by Alistair Darling's 2010 budget begins to settle, experts say they are 'surprised' by how 'un-green' the budget turned out to be
The UK Department of Transport announced on Thursday that the British government will be constructing recharging hubs for electric cars and give as much as £5,000 to each individual who purchases an ‘ultra-low carbon’ vehicle starting next year.
Ice broken off from Mertz glacier is size of Luxembourg
An iceberg the size of Luxembourg that contains enough fresh water to supply a third of the world's population for a year has broken off in the Antarctic continent, with possible implications for global ocean circulation, scientists said today.
Your five-a-day can arrive loaded with ethical headaches. So how do you pick clean, green fruit and veg?
Support the underdog. You need cooking skills to disguise the taste of a cauliflower, but it's the king of British sustainability – and threatened through unpopularity.
Householders are being urged not to put out salty leftovers for birds or add salt in bird baths to stop them freezing - as it could kill their favourite garden visitors.
With the UK still in the grip of winter, the RSPB said gardeners should not add salt to water left out for the birds in a bid to prevent it icing over.
An innovative technology that can map what’s buried underground is being used by the agency to search for waste buried illegally, and make sure the polluter pays for its clean up.
The newest state of the art equipment, known as resistive tomography, is similar to the kit used on Channel 4’s Time Team programme and uses electrodes inserted into the ground at regular intervals to emit an electrical current.
This week the 10,000th person joined a campaign to create the Earth's biggest marine protected area in the Chagos archipelago.
A coalition of conservationists is calling on the British public to urge Gordon Brown to create "Britain's Great Barrier Reef" by designating its territory in the Indian Ocean as the biggest protected marine area on Earth.
Government officials are putting the finishing touches to plans to boost the take-up of renewable energy in Britain - which is the lowest in Europe - through a system known as the "clean energy cashback", or feed-in tariff.
In July last year the government unveiled the scheme which has been used successfully for years in other European countries and pays above-market rates for green electricity produced by consumers.
The world's most miserable-looking fish is in danger of becoming extinct, according to scientists.
The fish, which lives at depths of up to 800m, is rarely seen by humans but it lives at the same depths as other ocean organisms, such as crabs and lobsters and other edible sea creatures.
People have forgotten how to garden because instant technology has left us "afraid of the earth", according to Alan Titchmarsh.
The former Gardener's World presenter is fronting a new campaign with B&Q to try to encourage Britons to spend more time in their gardens. The retailer says that while sales of seeds are soaring, many of his customers have little knowledge of experience of making fruit and vegetables grow.
Calls to bring forward ban on recyclable material sent to landfill increase, as reports emerge of big increases in the quantity of textile waste being dumped
The proportion of total waste sent to landfill annually has decreased by nearly a quarter in recent years, but in that time textile waste has risen to more than one million tonnes, driven by what MPs from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) committee called the 'Primark effect', the tendency to discard low cost clothes quickly.
The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe.
The world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next 20 or 30 years, it is predicted.
Like most families, the Strausses have a bin full of rubbish awaiting collection after the festive season. The difference in their case is that it contains all the refuse they have generated in an entire year.
Full StoryCeltic Technologies will begin work in the New Year on reclaiming a derelict section of the Woolston New Cut Canal and creating an urban ecology park on an adjacent derelict site using green compost.
Full StoryInhaling smoked vulture's brain confers gift of premonition, according to vendors of traditional medicine in parts of Africa
"People believe it's foresight and this finds fertile ground in people's imagination. There is a lot of betting in South Africa. So we may see an increase connected to gambling around the 2010 World Cup."
Full StorySurveys conducted by National Trust wardens across England and Wales indicate that wildlife has struggled to cope with a changing climate and loss of habitat, but that there have also been winners.
Full StoryInappropriate management’ and a ‘lack of management’ are the greatest perceived threats to Local Wildlife Sites in England, according to a report by The Wildlife Trusts.
Full StoryThe leaking of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, has led to a media and political storm. The affair is being portrayed as a scandal that undermines the science behind climate change. It is no such thing, and here's why.
Full StoryYour guide to the issues, key players and countries taking part in the most important negotiations since the second world war
Full StoryFor the next two weeks, events in Copenhagen will dominate the headlines. It is not for nothing that the pithily-entitled 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP15 for short, has been described as "the most difficult talks ever embarked upon by humanity".
Full StorySome businesses in the United Kingdom have come together to launch schemes that promote products that are friendlier to the environment. Fifty of these companies recently joined a campaign to use a universal on pack recycling label so that customers are aware of what products use recycled materials.
Full StoryThe Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) said the smart meters, which enable power companies to take readings remotely and will spell the end of estimated billing, will save consumers money, make electricity use more efficient and cut carbon emissions.
Full StoryThis autumn hundreds of thousands of young people in schools and youth groups across the country are being provided with free tree saplings to plant in their school grounds and community spaces.
People can further apply for a free tree and/or seeds pack for delivery in March 2010 by visiting http://www.woodland-trust.org.uk/hedge
Negotiations at the UN's climate summit in Copenhagen in December will use a language that is full of technical jargon and confusing acronyms. environmentguardian.co.uk's guide helps you translate the terms that will be debated as world leaders aim to strike a deal that will attempt to prevent devastating climate change
Full Story