Green fingered homeowner creates 'garden of eden' by planting verges on street

A homeowner has turned her city street into a real-life ‘Garden of Eden’ by planting its verges with wildflowers and fruit trees.

Green-fingered Grace Hills, 36, seeded around 15 patches of barren land with crops and bug-friendly flora to create the ecological oasis in Eden Crescent, Leeds.

She says she felt inspired to rejuvenate her neighbourhood five years ago due to her concerns about global warming and the future of the planet.

So she embraced ‘guerilla gardening’ - where growers plant on unwanted public land without formal permission - to transform the 30ft to 50ft patches.

The road is now home to apricot, apple, pear, cherry and plum trees - connected by miniature ‘wildflower meadows’ - which are perfect for bees and other pollinators.

She said the impressive lines of planted verges had been dubbed ‘The Garden of Eden’ both after the street’s name and biblical references.

Married Grace, who is a practising Christian, said: “We call the area where we’ve done it on our street ‘The Garden of Eden’ because it’s Eden Crescent.

“But also, faith has inspired me to do this, because the Garden of Eden is in the bible, and the first tree we planted was an apple tree.

“We’re up to 19 trees in total on the street. Fruit trees are great for taking carbon out of the atmosphere. But also, they give you fruit, so it gives you food resilience.

“There are six wildflower verges. They’re a nice little corridor for the bees to go down and take all the pollen. Last year, we did vegetables on the verge.

“I think if we can grow food on our doorstep, as well as it being zero air miles and no plastic, it’s going to be helpful for the future.”

Grace began her horticultural project before the pandemic, while she was transforming the garden of her three-bed semi-detached home with green initiatives.

And she said the local children on her street had been some of the earliest advocates of her idea to revitalise the verges, which cars previously parked over.

Grace said: “I was just gardening in my front garden, and they’d lean over the wall saying, ‘What are you doing? Can we help?’

“But I couldn’t have them in my garden, so I came out onto the street, and we made this shared space between our houses.

“We started by growing beans in little tin cans and then expanded. And now we’re at our boldest.”

Grace said she had used seeds from native wildflowers to create the ‘miniature meadows’, which she said operate as corridors for bees to travel down.

She later added other flowering plants, including lupins and hydrangeas.

Grace said: “There’s a mix of those wildflowers - so yarrow and clover - along with the ones that people recognize when you think of wildflowers, so the blue cornflowers, the red poppies and the daisy-like chamomile flowers.

“I call it a wildflower meadow, or corridor, as a generic term. But there are some garden plants in there.”

Grace said the ‘vast majority’ of her neighbours had been thrilled with her attempt to make the road 'more