Mixed Borders

Carol Rowntree Jones
Garden: Core Landscapes’ Pop Up Garden
and Plant Nursery
Core Landscapes is a ‘pop-up garden’ in the heart of the redevelopment of
Canning Town in east London.
It is a ‘meanwhile’ site, a delightful term. The garden moves from one
development site to another, derelict plots that are, before construction
starts, meanwhile, a garden.
Because it has to move every few years, and because the ground is so poor,
everything in the garden is grown in containers: herbs, perennials, oak
trees, hornbeams; ponds, even.
As a poet, the idea of containment fascinated me. A poem is a container of
ideas, images, emotions, all held within the form chosen by the poet. After
an initial visit to the garden, spending time with some of the volunteers
who work there, I wrote a series of poems and fragments, highly conscious
of rearrangement, how parts of a poem can be reordered and how the
elements arrange themselves on the page.
For the garden open day, I gathered a small collection of jars and boxes,
echoing the containers in the garden, to make a ‘poetry lucky dip’, rolling
my poems individually into tiny scrolls. One woman took her poem away,
to read that night “by lamplight”. I love that about poetry – how readily it
can heighten small moments in our lives.
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