
My First London Home: Tony Woods
My parents were serial house renovators. We moved house a lot and lived in building sites our whole childhood and teenage years. Weekends and holidays were spent clearing the garden, digging holes and making dens with my brothers and sisters.
I was a strange child. I loved plants and growing things. If it was my birthday, I wanted a chicken. I started to rescue ex-battery hens and used to buy ex-free-rangers for 50p each and sold the eggs to neighbours, so I was quite entrepreneurial.
I had a good idea of what hard work was. By the time I was 15, I could mix cement, plant trees, and lay foundations. And there was no question that I wanted to go to horticultural college.
When I was at secondary school, one of our art teachers started a gardening club and five or six geeky kids joined. But the kids that did it got bullied. The other kids would come along and smash things up.
Now gardening is so cool. If you're a 16-year-old, you can be out on the allotment or look after houseplants. But I was bullied for gardening. My dad was in the police, and I was into gardening – it was a double whammy.
Years later, I called my business Garden Club London in honour of all those kids who made my life hell!
I first moved to London in 2008, to Victoria Drive in Southfields, really close to Wimbledon. It was an ex-local authority house share that had been carved into more rooms than it should have been.
After a year, I moved to Putney, then Lavender Hill – all rental – then with my now-wife Lizzie to Clapham South, to Alderbrooke Road, for four or five years before moving to Folkestone. After moving house so often as kids, this feels like home.
I began working for a landscape company, in billionaires' gardens, for celebrities, or sometimes just helping someone in a rental prune back their garden.
Some of the client requests were completely bonkers. One very famous person, who had an immaculate designer garden, said the grass was the wrong shade of green. They were flying back from America and insisted their grass was sprayed green. We applied this lawn paint but it rained and the dye leached onto his limestone steps. It looked like something out of Halloween. The client came back and screamed at us. We had to bleach it clean.
We had a similar client who lived on a street in Notting Hill – a very well-known, very rude person. They had super-renovated the terrace and everything in the garden was painted white. We didn't really want to do the work – it was outdoor cleaning not gardening – but the concierge pleaded with us.
It turns out there was an old chap who lived next door whose life had been ruined by all the building work. So, he would buy blackberries from Portobello Road Market and feed them to the birds who would go and shit all over the neighbour's white garden.
Fast forward a few weeks later and it had snowed. The concierge asked us to come back and melt the snow because it had turned grey. He wanted us to make it disappear because it was not the right shade of snow.
We did our first million-pound garden last year. It was stressful, but the clients and their kids were so appreciative.
You've got two types of clients. One will text you when they know you're on holiday to tell you that a lightbulb isn't working. The other one will take a picture of a flower that has just come out in their garden and send it to you.
Our first [RHS] Chelsea garden was a step into the unknown. You have to balance keeping your business running and competing at the Olympics of gardening.
We did the floating park in Paddington on Merchant Square. That was a combination of real naivety and excitement. We knew we had to do something that had never been done before in Europe. At one stage, the headline in the Evening Standard was 'London's floating disaster'. But we got it finished. It's eight years old now, and we've won many awards for it.
I'm a real plants person. My perfect urban garden would have lots of herbs to really hack into for cooking: mint for tea and mojitos, lemon verbena for garnishing. And lots of scent – star jasmine and martagon lilies. There'd be no outdoor speakers – just bring a Bluetooth speaker out – no coloured lighting, and no inconsiderate fire pits.
The Komorebi Container Garden, designed by Garden Club London and Masa Taniguchi and sponsored by Hamptons, won gold at RHS Chelsea and has been relocated to a school rewilding project in Kent.
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I'm watering my lawn during the hosepipe ban but fear my neighbour seeing: I get so many letters like this, says lawyer DEAN DUNHAM. Do you know the risk you're taking? This is how your water company will find out
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The Guardian
5 hours ago
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Push a swing and you won't be more than a metre from one of the older generation pushing another. While I am writing this article, there is a grandparent downstairs in my own home, pretending to be a monster, so I can work. My daughter's grandparents, on both sides, have provided scheduled and ad hoc care since she was a baby. My partner and I couldn't have coped – financially or psychologically – without them. Via community groups and charities, word of mouth and a Guardian callout, I have heard from scores of grandparents who look after their offspring's offspring, doing school runs, sleepovers, film nights and baking. Several have moved house to be nearer their grandchildren, or had their children move closer to them off the back of the promise of childcare. So why do they do it? The main reason for many is simple: they enjoy it. Anita Pollack and Phil Bradbury moved out of Newham, east London, after 50 years to be near their grandchildren in Essex. 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Some grandparents I speak to say that being around young children at an older stage of life gives them the space they didn't have with their own children. Maria, a retired childminder in Manchester, says: 'We don't have the added stress or pressures we had when our children were growing up. We have more time to just enjoy being with them.' Wendy, 77, who lives in Guildford and looks after her two grandsons once a week, says: 'Grandparenting is better than being a parent. There is less anxiety.' Of course, when grandparents are so deeply invested, it can lead to friction. There may be disagreements about values. After all, even the basics of how children are looked after now differ, sometimes drastically, from the way many in this generation brought up their own children. In a 2021 study of British grandmothers, some participants were taken aback by the expectation that children be constantly supervised. In my home, as well as many others, the consumption of sugar is a common source of tension. 'She's eaten well today,' my mum has reported on occasion, before listing off a cheese toastie, cake and 'a bit of Grandad's Twix bar'. Occasionally, screen time can be a jostle – just how many episodes of Bing is too many? Several grandparents report finding the prevailing style of 'gentle parenting' tricky. Take this example, from an anonymous Guardian reader: 'I have no issue with telling them if they have done something wrong. The four-year-old pushed her friend out of the way. My response was to make her say sorry to her friend straight away; her mum would rather talk to her and ask why she did it.' If grandparents are providing free childcare, is it reasonable to expect them to follow their own children's ideals when it comes to care? They aren't, after all, professional childcare workers. Despite this, the benefits outweigh any costs for all parties, says Anna Rotkirch, a Finnish sociologist who studies population ageing and families. 'If you have a strong, close relationship to a grandparent compared with those who don't, then you have fewer problems.' In times of upheaval – when parents divorce, for instance – 'if you have at least one strong bond to a grandparent, that will be a kind of resilience booster'. An older relative's home can be a raft of stability during difficult times with your parents. Denise Burke runs the thinktank United for All Ages with her husband, Stephen Burke. She does this as well as picking up her eight-year-old grandson, Ardy, from school once a week and having him overnight. 'It's not just about the childcare, it's what Ardy gets out of it,' she says. She cites trips to the local Indian restaurant or the pub. 'He gets on well with our friends … and I think it really does children good to be mixing with all ages.' 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The serious point here is that grandparents are now so often part of the caring package for young children that perhaps this should be a consideration. When Labiche-Robinson's daughter and granddaughter eventually move out, she will still be getting involved, she says: she is invested in raising Nia. 'She's my granddaughter. So I'm very attached her – to all of them, my children and my grandchildren … while I'm here, I might as well help the family.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.


The Independent
6 hours ago
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