CORPUS CHRISTI —
With the New Year quickly approaching, people are thinking of resolutions, and I challenge each of you to make one or more gardening resolutions. Even if you fail to perfectly maintain a resolution, don’t get discouraged. Simply think about your choices and adopt ways to improve your gardening practices.

Here are some suggestions to help you think about a new course of action for 2013.

I will have a water-efficient landscape. With lake levels continuing to drop and water restrictions recently tightened, it seemed appropriate to begin with this one. Water restrictions will force homeowner, not to water lawns between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., but every gardener should recognize this as a practical approach to water savings, even after rains eventually restore lake levels. Besides irrigation timing, other practical ways to conserve water in the landscape include purchasing soaker hoses or sprinklers with large water droplets. You also can plan to reduce the area filled with water-loving annual flowers and replace some of them with colorful perennials that need less water once they are established. Another easy approach is to mulch regularly in flower beds, usually adding extra each spring and fall to maintain about 3-4 inches of mulch.

I will regularly monitor and adjust my irrigation system. If you have an automatic watering system, it is important to inspect the positioning of sprinkler heads to make sure they are functioning properly and delivering water evenly throughout your yard.

I will look for more organic approaches to pest problems. Whether you are battling bugs, fungi, or weeds, you can look for solutions that require fewer chemicals. Often, these problems can be solved by physically smashing bugs or caterpillars, or by pulling weeds.

I will properly apply fertilizer to my lawn. Determine the size of the area of lawn and flower beds so you can figure out how much fertilizer to apply. Then you can take that information to your favorite retail garden center to help you pick the right fertilizer and quantity for your yard.

I will maintain my lawn tools and equipment. I must admit that this is one of the most neglected areas of gardening. Give your lawn mower a tuneup so it runs better and uses less fuel this next year.

I will take time to share gardening with a friend. It could be offering to help a friend with their gardening and sharing your insights and gardening tips with them. It also could be giving a plant to a friend or a child so they can watch it grow and enjoy its beauty.

Happy gardening for a safe and environmentally-friendly New Year!

Garden tip

REsolutions for fertile new year

Resolve to be a better, safer and more organized gardener in 2013. Here are just a few tips:

• Wear shoes (not sandals), gloves, hat and sunscreen (yes, even in the winter) to work in the garden.

• Always return tools to the same place. You won’t have to search for them the next day!

• Take care of cuts, scrapes and bruises immediately to avoid infection.

• Use mulch to top dress and compost to improve your soil. Your garden will be more beautiful and productive.

— Katie Martin, UC Marin Master Gardener

SALISBURY — The new year is just around the corner; have you made any resolutions? The annual gesture of self-improvement and moderation often fails quickly, especially with home gardeners.

Gardening is complex, truly dependent often on situations we cannot control. However, below are some resolutions that will improve the odds of success for the new gardening year.

Don’t guess with fertilizers — Most homeowners guess how much fertilizer, especially lime, to apply on their lawns, shrubs and vegetable gardens. Soil sampling is a free service provided by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. The results are now online in an easy-to-understand format. The soil sampling kits and information are available at the Extension Center on Old Concord Road in Salisbury. Homeowners mail soil samples to the N.C. Department of Agriculture in Raleigh.

Start a file of garden tips and information — File away bits and pieces of useful information. There are a number of gardening and calendar apps for tablets and computers to document your gardening endeavors — good or bad. Make the file or tablet readily accessible to periodically update or delete out-of-date information.

Am I supposed to prune now? — Many homeowners prune fruit trees, vines and shrubs with no knowledge of exactly why they are pruning. Know why apple trees are pruned to a central leader and peach trees as an open vase. Correct pruning techniques can increase yields, produce better quality fruit and reduce pesticide sprays. Correctly pruned shrubs will produce more flowers and berries. Pruning is mandatory for quality fruits and healthy shrubs, but it must be done correctly.

Maintain equipment — Take time this winter to maintain power equipment with an oil change or tune-up if needed. Sharpened, well maintained mower blades reduce engine wear, improve the turf’s appearance and reduce the incidence of disease. Jagged leaf blades from dull blades look bad and increase incidence of foliar disease problems. Replace all seals and gaskets in hand pump sprayers now so you will be ready when the pests of spring arrive.

Have a plan — Impulse buying and planting without a plan can produce nightmares later as the landscape develops. Overgrown plants, improperly spaced plant material, diseased or non-adapted plant material are typical problems associated with impulse planting. Solicit the help of reputable and qualified nurserymen or landscapers before initiation of a landscape planting.

”We always plant Silver Queen corn” — Home vegetable gardeners and flower gardeners often plant the same varieties each season. While it makes sense to “stick with a winner,” there are new varieties of vegetables and flowers that warrant a homeowner test. All-America Selections are usually a good choice, whether it’s a vegetable, fruit or flower selection. Be sure to correctly label new varieties and make notes about growth, development and other pertinent characteristics during the growing season. These notes will be instrumental in selection of next season’s crop.

Implement IPM in your garden (Integrated Pest Management) — Scout for insects and diseases on a routine basis. Can you live with the problem? Use only the softest pesticides first to control the problem. Read and understand the label and use pesticides only when needed.

The following is from the Internal Revenue Service:

December is traditionally a month for giving generously to
charities, friends and family. But it’s also a time that can have a
major impact on the tax return you’ll file in the New Year. Here are
some “Season of Giving” tips from the IRS covering everything from
charity donations to refund planning:

• Contribute to Qualified Charities: If you plan to take an
  itemized charitable deduction on your 2012 tax return, your donation
  must go to a qualified charity by Dec. 31. Ask the charity about its
  tax-exempt status. You can also visit IRS.gov and use the Exempt
  Organizations Select Check tool to check if your favorite charity is a
  qualified charity. Donations charged to a credit card by Dec. 31 are
  deductible for 2012, even if you pay the bill in 2013. A gift by check
  also counts for 2012 as long as you mail it in December. Gifts given to
  individuals, whether to friends, family or strangers, are not
  deductible.
• What You Can Deduct: You generally can deduct your cash
  contributions and the fair market value of most property you donate to a
  qualified charity. Special rules apply to several types of donated
  property, including clothing or household items, cars and boats.
• Keep Records of All Donations: You need to keep a record of
  any donations you deduct, regardless of the amount. You must have a
  written record of all cash contributions to claim a deduction. This may
  include a canceled check, bank or credit card statement or payroll
  deduction record. You can also ask the charity for a written statement
  that shows the charity’s name, contribution date and amount.
• Gather Records in a Safe Place: As long as you’re gathering
  those records for your charitable contributions, it’s a good time to
  start rounding up documents you will need to file your tax return in
  2013. This includes receipts, canceled checks and other documents that
  support income or deductions you will claim on your tax return. Be sure
  to store them in a safe place so you can easily access them later when
  you file your tax return.
• Plan Ahead for Major Purchases.  If you are making major
  purchases during the holiday season, don’t base them solely on the
  expectation of receiving your tax refund before the bills arrive. Many
  factors can impact the timing of a tax refund. The IRS issues most
  refunds in less than 21 days after receiving a tax return. However, if
  your tax return requires additional review, it may take longer to
  receive your refund.

For more information about contributions, check out Publication
526, Charitable Contributions. The booklet is available on IRS.gov or
order by mail at 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676).

Really big containers are even better: within them you can come up with some
really interesting plant combinations. A winner that has trucked on for
years in my garden is a rusty old iron cattle trough with a convenient crack
in it (providing drainage). Bronze fennel dominates, Hakonechloa macra
‘Aureola’ (a weepy, golden-stripy grass) and a brown/yellow Viola ‘Irish
Molly’ are permanent, shorter, colour-coordinated residents, and in late
spring I add September-struck overwintered cuttings of pale yellow Argyranthemum
‘Jamaica primrose’, with Helichrysum petiolare ‘Limelight’ to
sprawl through the lot.

Another coffin-size container in my driveway – in full view of passers-by, the
planting in it needs to demonstrate that I at least know how to keep things
alive if I am to preserve some sort of reputation – is home to that most
voluptuous of herbaceous geraniums, Geranium palmatum (not hardy in the
north). Stalk loads of pink flowers are carried above its glossy leaves for
weeks in the summer. With a bit of tidying up, the shuttlecock of foliage
endures all winter (even perking up last week after being “wilted” by recent
frosts). You might think that bit-part players in this drama have a lean
time of it. But a small self-seeded colony of Bowles’ golden grass (Milium
effusum) and dusky Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’ perform
with understated efficiency. And while the geranium itself will be short
lived, it has conveniently self-seeded within the trough.

Container planting doesn’t all have to be high impact and in your face. “Best
in Show” at Yemm Towers last summer came about somewhat by chance. Fearing
that after several years’ service in my shady woodland patch, a mature Hellebore
x sternii ‘Silver Dollar’ (with biennial flower stems) was on its last
legs, last spring I bought a new young plant “to bring on” as a replacement.
I realised that the very large plastic container into which it was repotted
(in John Innes No 3 plus leafmould) would fit neatly into a vacant urn
outside my kitchen window, so there I plonked it.

Virtually maintenance free – such a large pot needed little watering – the
hellebore’s jagged leaves grew larger and ever more beautiful during the
summer, and there it sits right now, with dusky-pink tinged flower buds just
developing on the shoot tips. Maybe it will get planted out in the garden as
planned. Maybe it won’t. I could just cut its flowering shoots back in early
summer, and let it put in a repeat performance in its pot next year. And
maybe I will be here to tell you about it.

APM Monaco SA

Find the Perfect Christmas Jewellery Gift

Gardeners across the country will have the chance to test their knowledge at a celebrity-set, nationwide gardening quiz in March. 

Top TV gardeners have voiced the specially recorded Celebrity Gardening Quiz for Garden Re-Leaf Day 2013. 

The quiz, now in its second year, features questions set and recorded by experts including David Domoney, Christine Walkden, Joe Swift, Toby Buckland, Pippa Greenwood, Matthew Biggs, Peter Seabrook and Bob Flowerdew, plus a special message from Alan Titchmarsh. 

An annual fun, national initiative designed to get us back in our gardens and raise money for charity, Garden Re-Leaf Day is coming to a garden centre in the South-east on March 8. 

Last year’s inaugural Garden Re-Leaf Day saw more than 500 garden centres across the UK run a huge range of special in-store and community activities to get the gardening season off to a flying start – raising more than £50,000 for children’s hospice garden charity, Greenfingers, along the way.

If you have a team interested in taking part, details of where quizzes are being held are being listed on the organisation’s website. 

Allotment societies and gardening clubs can also run the event. Email info@gardenreleaf.co.uk for details.

Profits from the quiz events will go towards Garden Re-Leaf Day’s designated charity, Greenfingers.

It’s been a tough year for garden wildlife, so follow my lead at Glebe Cottage and make a few changes to help the visitors thrive.

Our gardens are important. In fact, they’re vital.

About 90 per cent of homes in the UK have gardens, which, together, cover a greater area than all our nature reserves. And their usefulness to vulnerable wildlife is incalculable.

It’s been a rough year for gardeners but an even rougher one for our wild creatures. On the Somerset Levels during the past few weeks the ground has been so waterlogged that for any bird other than a duck, swan or moorhen, the going has been tough.

The ground was so sodden for such extended periods that ground-feeding birds, song thrushes and dunnocks have been finding it hard to feed. There’s been no grass to peck amongst and worms will have been drowned by rainwater. There’s also been a shortage of seeds to eat for finches and no caterpillars, insects or nuts around for blue tits.

All a flutter

And it’s been a miserable, wet year for butterflies too. They do not fly in the rain so will have had difficulties reaching their nectar food plants and problems finding a mate.

If they did manage to mate and lay eggs, the plants on which they lay their eggs and their caterpillars depend were often waterlogged. Wild fruit, particularly brambles – which provide an important supplement to autumn-hatched -butterflies – was in scarce supply.

Low light levels and cold weather have all compounded an already serious decline in butterfly numbers.

Nobody can change the weather – not in the short term anyway. But next year I’m determined to make a special effort to do as much as possible to attract and help wildlife.

Christmas seems a good time to think about how to make our gardens more wildlife friendly. There are all sorts of actions that can be taken with little or no expense and, in a few cases, it is NOT doing things that could help invertebrates, birds and small mammals.

Make a mess

Being over-tidy can be counter-productive as lots of insects, including the black beetles that are arch-enemies of slugs, need somewhere to hide during the winter months. Tufty grasses make an ideal refuge but are useless if too neatened. And cutting back seedheads prematurely deprives birds of food.

At Glebe Cottage, we garden organically. Although it was slow at first, the garden has achieved its own balance.

Most of the flowers we grow are species rather than overbred hybrids and doubles (many of which produce little pollen or nectar), and they attract a host of pollinating insects. In summer there is the constant drone of hoverflies and bees. Butterflies visit frequently and as well as scores of peacocks and red admirals, there are visits from brimstones,painted ladies and a fritillary or two. There are moths aplenty too, such as the amusing hummingbird hawk moth.

Phlox, sweet rocket, and honeysuckle are some of the most familiar evening scented plants.

Flowers are perfumed with only one aim: to attract the insects to pollinate them and give them the opportunity to set seed. If a plant pumps out the perfume in the evening you can bet it is moths who pollinate it. Our delight in their fragrance is by-the-by.

The garden is always alive with birds. Residents include the usual suspects: titmice, blackbirds, wrens, song thrushes (evidenced by tapping noises as they smash snail shells on various stones) and a robin or two.

Years ago, when we were filming Grow Your Own Veg, one of our robins had a name – Highbrow – describing an extra eyebrow in red. He was part of a brood raised in the small greenhouse in the middle of our nursery.

Red alert

We came across the nest tucked between cardboard boxes when spring cleaning. The boxes were moved back carefully, eggs hatched and the fledglings reared in plain sight of visiting children.

Charms of finches descend at seed time and woodpeckers, nuthatches and tree-creepers take full advantage of the haute-cuisine in the oaks that run down one side of the garden.

On the other side, a well-established native hedge will enrich the bounty for years to come.

Favourite sights and sounds include gangs of long-tailed tits twittering in the trees, the eerie cries of buzzards circling high overhead and the swoosh of our resident sparrowhawk – more impressive by far than the RAF jets that soar over the surrounding countryside. In the dusk, tawny owls hoot to each other and the ghostly shape of a barn owl floats -silently over the fields.

“Yes,” you may well say, “but you live in the middle of the countryside and have a bigger than average garden.” But even the tiniest urban garden can provide food and shelter for so many creatures.

You don’t have to create a vast wild flower meadow – wild flowers can be grown in big pots. A strip of wild flowers in the veg garden will encourage lots of beneficial insects, such as hoverflies – whose larvae will gobble up aphids – and bees, which pollinate clover and lotus, both of which fix nitrogen in the soil.

So forget about uniformity and try to exploit different parts of the garden to grow a diverse range of plants. The wider the range, the greater the assortment of -creatures you will attract.

I want to test your mettle on nettles

I have made some nettle fertiliser. When’s the best time to use it? Is it okay for everything, including heathers and bulbs?

S Atterton, Barnehurst, Kent

CAROL: Nettle fertiliser is full of nitrogen and trace elements. Nitrogen is what plants need for healthy leaf growth and it’s needed most when plants are in active growth – not at this time of year. Store it and start using it next spring. Be sure to dilute it with water. It’s powerful stuff and will benefit any plant.

Ash: Don’t go off the beaten track

What can I do with all the ash from our fire (we burn smokeless coal)? M Gorman, Hucclecote, Gloucestershire

CAROL: Don’t put it anywhere near plants and crops. It contains traces of heavy metals and sulphur. The best place for it is on paths like an aggregate where it won’t get washed away. Power station ash is used in aerated concrete blocks and plasterboard, so you could try using it to bulk up concrete if you’re a bit of a handyman.

You answer..

Last week Mandy Hogg asked whether she should apply lime to her cabbage patch.

CAROL: Ideally you should apply lime before it gets frosty but it’s fine to do it now. Lime is used to counteract overly acidic soil. Some crops, in particular brassicas, do better in more alkaline soils.

Mrs A Bhalla, from Coventry, says: We rotate our crops and put lime on the area where we’re going to grow cabbages.

Andy Jenner, by email, says: We’ve given up on cabbages. We’re growing chard and leeks instead.

?? Can you help Mrs Rogers? We’ve noticed a growth like a mushroom at the base of our peach tree. We don’t want to lose the tree. What can we do? Mrs S Rogers, Lincolnshire

What we’re doing this week here at Glebe Cottage

I’m going to experiment with growing wild flowers in pots, so I’m collecting together all the big pots in which we grew tomatoes, cucumbers and other veg this summer and sowing, very thinly, a wild-flower mix. Later on, the seedlings will be thinned out – although I’ll try to leave a representative mix so we get a diverse range next summer. The pots can be left outside. After all, wild flowers are used to winter weather.

Neil spent a long time constructing a very beautiful owl box a while ago. Unfortunately, the only tenants it has housed so far have been a family of sparrows with ideas above their station! It needs a good clean out, so while there is still scaffolding up on the house for other building work, I’m up there with my bucket and scrubbing brush, doing a bit of owl house-cleaning. While I’m at it, I’ll take the secateurs to cut back the hydrangea petiolaris that seems to be attempting to lift the roof slates.

Offer of the week

Amaryllis are Britain’s favourite indoor winter flowering plant and no wonder – they produce fantastic, giant, long-lasting flowers. We are offering a mixture of large exhibition-size bulbs (32cm-plus circumference), which will produce up to three stems each. They, in turn, produce two to four flowers– ideal for table vase displays.

You can buy three exhibition-size amaryllis mixed for £19.99 or buy six for £34.98 – a saving of £5. Delivery will be within 28 days and varieties will be named.

To order by debit/credit card, call 0844 811 6716, quoting SMG18018, or send a cheque made payable to MGN SMG18018 to Amaryllis Mixed (SMG18018),

PO Box 64, South West District Office, Manchester, M16 9HY.

Alternatively, you can visit www.mirrorreaderoffers.co.uk/018.

They were even older than my parents, these things. My mother said she’d been given them by an elderly couple, childless, Viennese I think, whom she had met at a language class. Between Christmases, the decorations sat in their gasmask box, wrapped in pages of the Radio Times December 1947 and it was part of the ritual that, each year, we packed them away in the same torn squares of paper.

Ritual is a vital part of Christmas, but when you move from one house to another, some things have to change. We can still hang a wreath on the front door of our new place, as we did on the old, but where should the Christmas tree go? More importantly, where should we put Father Christmas? Father Christmas is a cardboard mobile – him, the sledge and several reindeer – and he came to us in the Seventies, a spin-off from the brilliant strip cartoon books that Raymond Briggs brought out then.

In the old house, the mobile hung from a bacon hook in the ceiling of the back sitting room, high enough not to tangle in anyone’s hair. Setting him in place was always the last thing we did, the finishing touch to our Christmas preparations. But we don’t have such generous ceilings now and FC still hasn’t found a comfortable place to fly.

Another change came when we shifted the Christmas feast from lunchtime to evening. That’s only possible as your children get older. But gradually, the feast became the high point of Christmas, with anything from a dozen to 20 people around the table and because of that, I started another ritual. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I shut myself in the dining room and constructed a centrepiece for the table while listening to the King’s College carols on the radio. When it was done, I shut the door on the room and nobody went in until Christmas night, when it was time for the feast to begin.

Flower arranging in the formal sense – pedestals, wafty bits of chiffon – is not my thing. But I love decorating and a centrepiece for the Christmas table gives more scope for invention than a Christmas tree. The transient nature of a table decoration is a huge advantage, too. You don’t have to worry about what it may look like the next day. This is a one-night stand.

A Christmas centrepiece needs evergreens and things that shine silver and gold. It needs the warmth of red, but the red shouldn’t come from roses. They feel all wrong at Christmas – ludicrously out of season, and therefore ludicrously expensive. Amaryllis (hippeastrums as they are now called) are in season and come in some wonderfully uncompromising shades of red. But they are tall, and you don’t want to make a fence between one side of the table and another.

You can use them in a kind of cornucopia, though. Start with a big square of silver foil to protect the table and reflect light. Build up a bed of moss on that and lay a nest of terracotta pots (old ones if you’ve got them) on their sides in the centre, not tightly packed, but curving slightly one away from the other. Stand small pots of cyclamen here and there around the central pots and then construct a flow of twigs and greenery spiked with flowers to come from the mouth of the last pot.

It’s an imprecise craft. But you do need a good supply of materials – most of which I usually get from the garden. Moss, twigs (especially beech and dark red twiggy bits cut from a variegated dogwood), teasels,f silvered seedheads are all good. Walnuts can be fantastic. Silvered, each one becomes a priceless artefact, the slight wrinkles of the shell looking as if they have been chiselled by a craftsman. If you are ultra-fashionable, you can turn out distressed walnuts. Spray them first with gold, them give them a quick burst of deep red, but not so much that it stops the gold shining through.

Ivy is the greatest of all gifts for decorating because at this season it carries heads of berry as well as strong, handsome evergreen leaves. As with the cyclamen above, ivy (sprayed or left green – it depends what you are using it with) disguises plastic pots, bridges awkward gaps, always drapes itself well wherever you put it.

Ivy is what I mostly use to make garlands as it’s much kinder on the hands than holly. Start with a string of Oasis-foam sausages. You can buy special plastic cages, about 15cm/6in long, which split open to take a slab of the Oasis and then link together with hooks. Or, a cheaper option, you can wrap long, thin slabs of Oasis in plastic netting, pinching in the gaps between the slabs as you go. Make up the length of sausages you need, soak them in the sink until the Oasis is saturated and then let it drain.

Lay the whole thing out on a flat surface and start pushing short pieces of ivy into the Oasis. It covers up very quickly. You can add baubles or kumquats on wire, hips, dried orange slices (if you’ve had the forethought to make them), small sprays of silvered larch cones, bows of red velvet ribbon… but generally garlands look best if you stick to one evergreen for the background (it could be blue-green spruce, if you’ve got one you can cut) and no more than three add-ons. Tie string either end and fix the garland in place. I find they usually hang well, but if there are gaps in the chain, when it’s in situ you can easily fill them with more greenery.

In any scenario around Christmas, candles are vital. The ones that are made from rolled sheets of beeswax look pretty and smell hauntingly of honey, but they don’t last long, and will probably give up around the time of the Christmas pudding. Fat candles balance better than thin ones and enhance the sense of plenty that you should be aiming at. Creamy church candles are excellent and will last for several Christmases. I buy vast quantities from Ethos Candles factory shop, just off the A303 at Mere in Wiltshire (01747 860960). Happy Christmas.

John Lewis is chief executive of Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation

Communities must be involved in new towns from the outset: Development partnerships are a great idea as long as there is local involvement threaded through the governance of the partnership. The days of commandeering swathes of land without consultation and involving local people in the process are long gone.

Think long-term when it comes to finances: Unlike garden cities, the new towns were unable to capture land value for the benefit of the town itself as the value had to be returned to the Treasury. Letchworth has been able to capture value and retain the income streams for the benefit of residents, this is the critical difference. And this is the model that needs to be revisited as a solution to ensuring long term management of new places.

Katy Lock is the garden cities advocate at the Town and County Planning Association

We need to de-risk investment: While the government’s announcements should go some way to facilitate this, we still need them to provide certainty on funding and delivery mechanisms to reassure investors that upfront investment will pay off over the long term. Models such as the Netherlands’ infrastructure investment model where the Dutch municipal bank provided finance for development at low rates of interest to be paid back over 15 years could be useful in Britain.

Richard Blyth is head of policy and practice at the Royal Town Planning Institute

There is no distinction between new towns and garden cities: All large scale new development needs to solve the key question of what work are people going to do who live there, and where is this work to be located. The Howard concept was really about linking a series of garden cities, which partly by design and partly by accident has actually happened in Cambridge, Royston, Letchworth, Hitchin, Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City and now Kings Cross.

Investment in transport is essential to make planning work: I doubt that any garden city can be remotely self contained these days so what matters is how they relate to existing places and to each other. This requires the government to swallow really hard and plan transport investment along with housing policy.

Robin Hoyles is group land and planning director at Crest Nicholson

Garden cities were mostly designed before mass car ownership unlike the new towns: The rise in car ownership is one of the greatest challenges we face in delivering 21st century garden cities and we are encouraging our masterplanners to think innovatively about how the car will be incorporated successfully into our future large scale schemes. Rear parking courts that have become the norm across developments for the last 10 years are not welcomed by residents who wish to park outside of their front door. It means they park in undesignated spaces where there is not adequate space. The garden city approach gives us the opportunity to take into account where people wish to park and adapt the streetscape accordingly.

Handing open spaces over to local authorities might not be the answer: From past experience we have discovered that whether the management of the open space is handed over to a management company or a residents association there are challenges, especially in terms of the long term maintenance. As a result we have investigating new and innovative ways to manage these spaces by learning from trusts and assessing structures at Letchworth, Hampstead garden suburb and elsewhere. We are hoping to create a board of management type structure which would have 2 tiers. Depending on the size of the development the board of management would compromise 4 experts from backgrounds such as estate management, planning, architecture or law who would offer independent professional advice. The second tier would be a group of elected residents to provide some democracy in the process.

Colin Wiles is a housing consultant with more than 30 years’ experience in the social housing sector

We have come a long way from the original vision of garden cities: The original vision of the garden city was an estate of 6,000 acres of which only 1,000 was built upon. The city would be surrounded by farmland that would produce its food, and provide the town with goods from factories and workshops and waste would be recycled and used on the land. It’s a very modern concept (a true eco-town in fact!), although the vision was never fully realised. So yes, there is a distinction between garden cities and new towns in terms of the original vision, but in truth there is not a great deal to distinguish between Welwyn and Stevenage, except that the former features better design and is greener.

Sabine Coady Schäbitz is the director of the Collaborative Centre for the Built Environment (CCBE) at the University of Northampton

Would new garden cities be seen as an imposition from above or an expression of local ambitions? Would people actually want to live in completely new garden cities? Or would they prefer to see improvements and additions to the places they currently live in – making them more liveable? Overall there is a lot of opposition to large scale development or even just development in this country – despite the obvious need. This is something which needs to be acknowledged and worked with.

Kevin Thompson is chief executive of North Hertfordshire Homes (NHH)

There are two separate debates going on in this sphere: One is whether we have the capacity to develop and implement large scale new town projects and the other is whether they are a good thing. I don’t believe that previous generations that built new towns, garden cities or large scale social housebuilding after the wars were better at it, or less restricted by financial, legislative or capacity issues or the availability of land than we would be. The government is already trying to release public land for housebuilding. It has enough of it to create two cities the size of Leicester.

As to whether they are a good thing, the consensus seems to be they would be, providing the scale was sufficient for them to be sustainable. I don’t think this is utopian. Principles we would probably all hold to is that sustainable development needs to be based on environmental, economic and social components. Ebeneezer’s three magnets, in other words.

It is possible to be pro-regeneration and pro-new development: We must have the right housing in the right place. Empty homes are not necessarily the result of council or government social engineering, but the consequence of unemployment and demographic changes. For both new and old communities jobs, transport and schools are essential. Where urban areas can be regenerated we should do so, and we have a sad history of demolition but it should not be a stick to beat those looking to do other things in the right place for them.

John Hoad is head of planning at Campaign to Protect Rural England

Garden cities and new towns have a lot to teach us about collective social action to meet housing need: However they are very much of history and a particular time. Currently government tools are inadequate to create workable new settlements. We have no effective strategic planning to find suitable locations, we cannot acquire land for public use at existing use values and thus deliver land value capture to create the basis for infrastructure investment. The public sector thus cannot create the infrastructure framework for efficient private investment.

We have to be practical about what works now: It seems we are best working with the grain – organic development of existing cities and towns under strong planning control to prevent edge of town sprawl and waste of land – that creates the right incentives for landowners and counters the pure, individual, market decision making by the land owner. So even if we go for new towns we will need strong green belt and countryside protection policy to create compact energy efficient urban forms.

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