Urban Dystopia At the weekend I returned to a garden that I made about eight years ago to show it some love. Funny, you turn your back for five minutes (or five years as the case may be) and everything goes berserk. The formerly modestly proportioned planting was level with the fence and swathed in a thick blanket of bindweed. Not simply bindweed growing through it, more a dense shroud over straining shrubs, the stems coiling up from the ground in fat ropes. Stringy corpses from summers past providing a ladder for this year’s growth. The mat of foliage covered a good third of the garden, swamping the shrubs and reaching up into the cherry tree. Working my way into the murky green understory to undermine the menace, I considered a dystopia; humans gone, neighbours no longer trimming the tree and battling the bindweed on the boundary. Where the fence collapsed and the spreading, new, layered plants of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, Lonicera fragrantissima and Forsythia marched acros...