OOTS: Bowed, battered, and very nearly beaten

This is, or rather was, one of the more dramatic publicly-maintained council-funded plantings I know: the Victorian cascades at the foot of the hill in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight.

(The other one is the rock garden at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, but I keep forgetting my camera on trips to the beach so you'll have to wait for that one).

I expect my timing is all out, but I wanted to take a snap of this one as a contribution to Out on the Streets (OOTS), the regular slot on public planting hosted by Veg Plotting, and since I've just come back from my hols on the Isle of Wight and wanted to go on about it a bit, it couldn't wait.

Anyway: the Isle of Wight, of course, enjoys a mild microclimate which makes it very nearly subtropical in terms of plant life. Echiums, aeoniums and even cacti thrive outdoors here; public planting displays are as likely to include agaves and aloes as ageratum and antirrhinums.

However, the IoW County Council has also been taking a hatchet to its budget: £32 million saved over four years, out of a total budget which was only about £200m in the first place. Around £15 million in cuts have already been identified; libraries, regional theatres, tourist information centres, sports facilities and public toilets are toppling like ninepins.

Parks departments are soft targets in such slash-and-burn strategies: £450,000 is coming out of the parks budget on the Island between now and 2013. Quite apart from Ventnor Botanic Garden, which has had its entire funding removed (of which more later) the holes are beginning to show in the Island's previously perfectly-manicured parks, once the pride of an area which depends heavily on tourism to keep itself solvent.

Unfortunately the budget cuts also coincided with the one of the worst winters in living memory. Even the Island, usually pretty much frost-free, had the deepest snowfall for decades. Not ideal for subtropical planting, and as you can see from the picture much of it was lost.

There's no money to replace it with either more exotics, or even run-of-the-mill bedding: so we're left looking at bare soil, right into July and peak tourist season.

I've been going to the Island every year for over a decade, and I've always looked forward to visiting this bit of Ventnor. I remember the area simply dazzling with colour: vivid orange marigolds and scarlet salvias jostling up against alyssum and magenta aubretia tumbling over the rocks. It wasn't tasteful, but my goodness, it was jolly, and never failed to put a smile on my face.

It's so sad to see it like this: still trying, just, but such a pale imitation of what it once was. So is this what we've got to look forward to, then? Scraggy bare bits interspersed with brave little patches of yellow daisies or pink geraniums?

Quite apart from cringing to think what the tourists will make of it - so much for Britain plc, then - this is not a country I want to live in. It's depressing, poor, uninspiring, defeated. You can blame whoever you like for the current crisis: but this can't, possibly, be the right way to take us forward.

Parks departments may be viewed as the poor relation as far as many local councils are concerned, but you underestimate the work they do at your peril. They're responsible for the public face we turn to the world: reduce them to a starved, beaten down skeleton, and you do it to all of us, too.

OOTS: Top Marks!

I've been meaning to take a photo of this for VP's OOTS campaign for ages. In fact so long has the poor woman been waiting for it that as I remember I first told her about it at the Malvern Spring Show. How sad is that.

But anyway: this weekend I made one of my rare visits to our local mind-numbingly bland industrial park, home to Argos, Tescos and M&S, and as it happens the Brooklands Motor Racing track.

About the only interesting thing about this bit of town is that you can see the old track, banked to a gradient of about one in five, arcing around the shopping carparks. The concrete is cracked and pockmarked with tufts of weeds poking out here and there but a faint echo still lingers of the speed records broken there in the 1920s and 1930s by the likes of Malcolm Campbell and others. It also did a star turn on James May's Toy Stories (sadly not available on Listen Again but here's a clip complete with Tiff Needell) in which He of Plasticine Chelsea Show Garden Fame recreated the Brooklands circuit using Scalextric cars.

But I digress. If you chucked a Scalextric car fairly energetically from the racing track you'd hit the shop I mostly come here for, that wonderfully reassuring British invention Marks & Spencer (what did we do for knickers before M&S came along, do you think?). And while I'm not usually in the habit of noticing trolley parks, this one, newly-installed this spring, was a bit different.

I'm regretting not having remembered to take my camera before now, as following the six or seven weeks of dry weather even tough-as-old-boots sedum matting was looking a little parched. You'll have to take my word for it that it looked terribly smart when first installed. I also missed what was obviously quite a spectacular flowering.

I don't suppose the M&S staffing budget quite stretches to someone dead-heading this lot but I found it quite pretty in an autumnal sort of way.

And you can see from this that the succulent leaves underneath are actually quite happy and have come through their drought without too much trouble. Quite an advert for this kind of very low-maintenance green roofing, I thought.

There was a bike shed just the same round the corner, too. They rather showed up the less eco-minded Tesco next door which had the old-fashioned plastic trolley parks (and no bike shed at all): rain was pouring off them onto the tarmac where it was, no doubt, lost to the drains. And they were as ugly as sin, too. Top marks to Marks, don't you think?