Meet Robbie Blackhall-Miles, whose Welsh garden has an early evolutionary vibe. He explains why he’s passionate about plants with fossil records that predate the extinction of the dinosaurs
Unwind a tape measure all the way out to 5 metres and imagine that each metre is 100m years, each centimetre a million years and each millimetre 100,000 years.
Suddenly, your tape measure is a timeline. Now have a look for the mark on the tape measure that represents 450m years – at 4.5m.450 million years ago, (or thereabouts), the very first plants crept on to land and, in so doing, they allowed the very first animals to colonise the land too. They created the first organic soils and changed the atmosphere. They laid down the foundations for humanity to, eventually, evolve.
Discover a world of inspiration.
Some 30 years ago, a boy sat under a huge monkey puzzle tree and imagined this strange early world, hardly able to comprehend the scale of time. For a boy of 10, the idea that there was a tree in his garden that belonged to an ancient family that had been grazed upon by dinosaurs was utterly mind-blowing. At 250cm on your tape measure, you’ll find the point at which the monkey puzzle tree started its evolution. The boy under that monkey puzzle tree was me.
The thoughts and ideas surrounding the vastness of evolutionary time have never left me and today, I grow a garden full of living plants that have a fossil record from deep in the ancient past.
I grow a garden full of living plants that have a fossil record from deep in the ancient past
Among them is a family that tells one of the greatest stories of our planet’s history. They are the protea family from the southern hemisphere.
Amazingly, their 95m-year-old fossils can be found…The post How does my garden grow? Cretaceous-ly appeared first on FeedBox.