Creekside Seasons
A puncture is not how I envisioned starting the day, no one ever does. They always seem to happen when you’re in a rush, people are expecting you, and the weather is particularly…challenging. I could feel the burn of the cold on my lungs after I raced to the Paper Garden to get supplies ready for our Saturday outing with the Green Ambassadors back in December 2023. The signs of Autumn handing over the reigns to Winter were whispering through the air and settling around me on my nose, ears, and fingers. Time to liberate the winter gloves and neck gaiter from the crevices of my wardrobe for the chilly morning cycles to come.
“I’ll just take the bus to Deptford” I decided as I hurriedly packed snacks, notebooks, pencils, and my work phone into my bag. I stared out of the window on the top deck of the 47, out to overcast skies and begged the clouds that they could hold on for a few hours before they unleashed their threatening showers.
Justina, Margherita, Marie, Marina, Elsie, Evie, Anna, and Niamh walked through the tall gates of the Creekside Discovery Centre where Kwesia (Green Ambassadors co-facilitator and creator of Citygirlinnature platform) and I greeted them. We were welcomed by Paddy Hayes, the Learning & Volunteering Lead who along with volunteer Olly, led us on our low tide walk through Deptford Creek.
We entered the centre where Paddy gave us an introduction and induction to the space and what we would be doing. Amongst the posters, books, and photos on the walls, was an aquarium housing crabs and other creatures typically found in the creek. Display cases and shelves were decorated with “waste” also found from decades of litter picking and exploring the river bed..
A rotary telephone, corded phone, a nokia 3310 mobile phone, a motorola razr flip phone, a walkman and an ipod classic are sat amongst Victorian clay pipe ends and dozens of vape cartridges, and a taxidermy fox staring eerily at the ceiling.
Walking through this bizarre time-travelling web of discarded stuff, we got to the end of a corridor where we took off our boots and trainers for dark green waders and donned red waterproof windbreakers atop our warm layers and made our way outside to secure a wooden walking stick.
As we shuffled across the pebbles on the foreshore of the creek bed and we started to enter the current softly flowing from the Thames into the River Ravensbourne, the wintery chill swirled around our wading boots and a calm fell over us as we pushed upstream ready to explore.
Using our walking sticks to guide us through muddy terrain, we walked, each of us scanning diligently for signs of wildlife. Crisp packets, golf balls, tin cans. We were discouraged. However, Paddy turned over an outdated Sainsburys loyalty card, and pointed to small raised, slimy spots dotted on its surface. A leech had laid its eggs on this piece of disused plastic. He then pointed to a mass of grasses and debris, what looked like a mess of jetsam that accumulated on the foreshore. This waste of plastic and metal had been turned into a nesting habitat by visiting swans, and volunteers had worked to secure and adorn it with aquatic plants to make this reclaimed pile of things into a cosy home for the new parents and their cygnets.
Several moons and many, many low tides later, we came back to see Creekside in its summer glory. Kwesia walked the foreshore for two, Emma returned from maternity leave and we were joined by Generators - Victoria, Alex, Sollie, Jamie, Lillie, Eli, and Amalia. We traded in our thermals for t-shirts and sunglasses, arms exposed to the sun, light radiating off of the water, buzzing of bees and hoverflies between wildflowers, grumbling of the DLR passing on the railway tracks overhead, and the sweet smell of grass underfoot as we walked down to the riverbed. The cooling pressure of the current swirling around our waders was a welcomed relief from the heat this time.
We found Chinese mitten crabs at various stages of life and death amidst the tamagotchis, hub caps, old wallets, and unidentifiable rubbish swept up between eroded bricks and pebbles that may have seen the scraps from bygone days of shipbuilding, tidal mills, and slaughterhouses. Mud and algae flanked us around the boats - home to people and birds alike. We dipped nets in the current to closely observe the aquatic fauna in plastic trays of clean water so we could better identify the hoglouse, freshwater shrimps and many other creatures that I can’t remember the names of now.
I have spoken at length to my colleagues and friends about the wonders of Creekside, and I really can’t wait to go back in another season. I am curious, saddened, and impressed to see how the natural world reclaims our careless wastefulness. I am honoured I get to share these exploration with the Generators who see the things I miss, both with their eyes and their minds. There are such conflicting things we hold as facilitators collaborating with young people, late stage capitalism, an educational garden, food growing, and the reality of this being underlined by an annual salary. It’s moments in these spaces where I hold these things at once and then not at all which enables me to keep moving like the river flowing through this creek across the debris of our wasteful systems.
Notes from the Garden
I wake to a bright crisp winter’s day. Finally … after weeks of storms ravaging the country.
As the year ends we are reminded of the magic and beauty that our gardens bring, as places to come together and celebrate, even in difficult times. This year it has been challenging not to be taken over by fear and despair, with extreme weather events being mirrored in different ways across the world, from floods to droughts; with the most recent political events; with wars destroying land and displacing entire populations; and with the constant increase in the cost of living creating ever more inequalities between those that have and those that do not.