How you notice summer here

A) Invading army of wildflowers:

Sylvan Cottage

B) Tulips watching over seances

North London Spiritualist Church

C) Tulips planted by the Friends

Wray Crescent

D: Endless summer, with cows.

W. Plumb butcher's shop

How Kinloch Gardens went from bad to gold

This is a post to celebrate good news.

Kinloch Gardens is a park just off the Hornsey Road.

It feels like a walled garden because it's surrounded by houses and they almost hide it. You'll only notice it if you walk to Pakeman primary school, stop, turn and look down what seems a normal side street for long enough to realise that there's a park there and not just a bit of greenery at the end of a cul de sac.

It's tiny, but you should still go find it. There are mosaics:

Kinloch Gardens cat mosaic thanks to Gaz-zee-boh on Flickr 

And there are flowers:

Kinloch Gardens in the late afternoon thanks to Gaz-zee-boh on Flickr  

The good news is that it won a 2012 Mayor's Safer Parks Gold Award because 'since the friends group was set up in 2008, there have been annual Easter, summer and winter events that have boosted local community involvement. It has been designated a ‘no drinking park’ which has reduced street alcohol abuse in Kinloch Gardens and enabled community events to flourish.'

If you'd like to join the Friends of Kinloch Gardens, go here.

Telephone Box Garden

This is the telephone box opposite what will be the Yale Terrace Tesco's:

It's a sorry thing, sitting there without any purpose or any future except decay and rust. It's also a beautiful thing because red telephone boxes just are, they look defiant even when they're beaten down. It's mostly a forlorn defiance, but there may be hope for this one. Not as a telephone box (that world's gone now) but as a garden.

Colette Blanchard, with help from Islington Council, has planted two derelict phone boxes in Archway. with miniature ivy, pansies, narcissus and polyanthus. The Tribune has the story here.  

If Tesco's want to help that parade of shops flourish they could get the With Love florists from across the road to do the same. 

Park Kitchen @Wray Crescent.

The Park Kitchen opened in Wray Crescent this Saturday. I meant to review the opening because I take my responsibilities as one of the Hornsey Road's leading bloggers seriously. It's a vocation. A calling. A quest.

The thing is, I got there too late and it was closed. There was wailing, gnashing of teeth and peckishness. All the more so as the trailer/cafe looked promising. 

My laziness was rewarded though, because the owner (who I think is called Paul) was still around closing up, as was  his mother and a friend. 

Paul's mother had a tupperware box with her, and the box had cakes that he had baked and she was proud and surprised at how good they were and, well, somehow I got a free cake. 

It was an excellent cake, crumbly and moist and all the things cakes should be. And I know cakes. 

This bodes well. Wray Crescent is a sweet little park (and the Friends of are doing good things) but it couldn't be perfect while it didn't have a cafe. And now it has a cafe that does sterling cakes.

Did you go when it was open? What did you think?

Follow @TheParkKitchen on Twitter for more information.