Green: revolution, resolution, or both?
How green spaces have taken on a new significance. At the risk of misquoting some famous author or playwright, we live in strange times. We need little reminder of the terrible outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic, and most of us are still scratching our heads, trying to quantify the short, medium and long term consequences of Brexit. Add to this, perhaps not surprisingly in times of stress, the fact that several long-valued national institutions are under scrutiny the likes of which they will not forget easily, and we could be forgiven for thinking that ‘strange’ times is more of a synonym for bleak or hard. And yet, one outcome of the last 14 months has been a re-evaluation, a re-assessing, even a remembering, of the positive value of green spaces. There has been a genuine re-awakening of joy in the nature around us, regardless of whether this is rolling acres of farmland or a carefully tended window box. ‘Flee the cities!’ In times of previous plagues and pandemics – the year