S3, E16: The Future of Urban Greening: A Conversation with Angus Cunningham

This transcript is digitally generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:12] Jackie De Burca: Hello from rainy Spain today. I’m actually delighted to say we’ve had some rain here in Spain. And I’m also delighted to say that I have a guest that I feel definitely is a bit of a kindred spirit from our chats previous to the interview, a lovely gentleman called Angus Cunningham, who is one of the directors of Scotscape. And you probably going to correct me and say this only yourself do correct me, please, Angus, come in with your own introduction about yourself, both personally and professionally.

[00:00:40] Angus Cunningham: Thank you, Jackie. I’m glad it’s raining on the plain.

[00:00:44] Jackie De Burca: Exactly.

[00:00:45] Angus Cunningham: It’s actually raining in London today as well. A light drizzle. It reminds me of the borders of Scotland.

I have co directors in Scotscape.

Scotscape is a company that’s been established since 19 90, 86 when I first pitched up in London.

And we’ve gone through a number of changes over the intervening.

It is actually getting on for 40 years.

And we now call ourselves urban greening specialists. And we install greening systems, sustainable planting in quite challenging locations in cities. And that’s what Scotscape does, that’s what.

[00:01:31] Jackie De Burca: You’re best known for. But like everybody, Angus, we all have our own stories, don’t we? I think it’s lovely to bring in the personal story that you told me before the interview of how you actually got to London. And it’s very interesting and I always believe that, you know, things tend to pan out if we follow the energy rather than being too strict about them.

[00:01:51] Angus Cunningham: Yes, that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. My.

My ending up in London wasn’t planned.

After school, I longed to work in the countryside. I wanted to be a gamekeeper and or work in the forestry commission. Being an outdoorsy sort and brought up in a sustainable Scottish family where nothing went to waste and trips to the supermarket were rare and mainly for essentials. But we did live off the land and looking back, it was, it was, it was just a wonderful, wonderful life in the fresh air. But unfortunately, I had to get further education. So I headed up to Aberdeen University, where I struggled academically, if I’m honest, and felt a bit embarrassed. It was struggling at uni. I was mixing with those who could do a quick big bit of revision and get through their exams. And I, of course, had to work harder than that and learn things almost parrot fashion. So year two, I headed down to London, having written my father a letter saying, I’m really sorry, but I want to go and try my luck in London.

And dad had been, you know, very impressed that I’d made it up to university.

So I felt I was letting him down by bunking out halfway through. In fact, I didn’t tell him I had no intention of going back. I wrote to him and saying, I want to take a year off in London. And 40 years later I’m still on my year off. But I’ve been on some journey from that early start. When I pitched up, I got the bus down to London, I pitched up and stayed on floor of my sister’s flat and managed to. Well, I didn’t actually know what I was going to do and all I knew was working outside and gardening. Fort sheet was in Victoria and I managed to get a job at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, which is around the corner where I served a year’s apprenticeship.

And that was my start. We all hit crossroads, don’t we? And looking back and, you know, that university experience was a crossroads because I did go a bit off pieced when I was there, but retribution in London. So, yeah, and it was gardening because I didn’t know any other skills and I loved the outdoor work. So that was a start point for me.

[00:04:28] Jackie De Burca: I’m fascinated by, obviously, your background, the sustainable parents in Scotland and, you know, that whole journey. One question for you, because it’s completely relevant to many other guests as well and I hope a good bit of the audience. Do you feel different when you’re outside? And how would it be for you, Angus, if you were stuck? Obviously we’re recording and you’re inside, but, you know, in general, if your job entailed being inside, like many office workers, how would that be for you?

[00:04:56] Angus Cunningham: Dreadful.

I couldn’t do. It was my mantra. I did not want to work in a big company or in an office. And I pushed the two together. I think it’s changed now since COVID but yes, but I’m, you know, really, I was brought up in the middle of nowhere and now that it’s kind of well spoken about that we’re connected to nature, we’re hardwired to nature. That’s what’s driving partly what’s driving nature into our cities. Because, you know, after Covid, when we were let out, we didn’t want to go and walk down the high street. We wanted to get in some green space that, you know, proves the point. So, yeah, I’m an outdoors person. Always has been, always will be.

Unfortunately, we have to do a little bit screen time and we do have to. We have to be organized but, yeah, I think I’m hitting 60 now. Well, I am 60 and I think the future is, once the business is up and running successfully, I’ll be off doing my bits outside because that’s where I long to do.

[00:06:12] Jackie De Burca: I’m going to give you a compliment now because I can actually see you. Even though this is a podcast we do have cameras on. I’m saying that for the benefit of the audience, you look younger than 60. And actually, a number of people that I’ve met in the last few months who are generally working with nature look younger than their age. So you can take that as a comment.

[00:06:31] Angus Cunningham: Oh, there you go. Thank you. Thank you, Jackie. I appreciate it.

[00:06:35] Jackie De Burca: Anyhow, going back to the actual work, why is it so important to you?

[00:06:41] Angus Cunningham: It’s important to me. It was important at the beginning of my journey in London because it was about survival.

I didn’t know what else to do.

It was important to me because I wanted to stand on my own 2ft and I didn’t have any other skills, I didn’t have any other tools.

It’s become as a business has morphed and changed over the. Over the 40 years. We started as a landscape maintenance company because that’s what I view. We grew into domestic landscaping, commercial landscaping, living walls, green roofs. We’ve been through the whole. The whole gambit and it’s important to me now.

I was going to say to leave a legacy, but that’s not really it. It’s important because it’s needed. And I live in a city, my friends, that was touched on the home, still can’t believe I went to London and stayed in London.

But this is. I live in a city and if you go into inner cities and you don’t see any green and you feel crap, well, then we should be doing something about it.

70% of the population will be living in cities by 2050 and we need to make them more sustainable and healthy places to live, work and play. Cities where they’re important, they drive economies. It’s where opportunities are. It’s why I came to a city, because I didn’t quite know what the opportunities would be. But that’s where opportunities happen. It’s super important to make our cities healthier and more sustainable and green. We need to bring biodiversity in because we’re going to live here and we are hardwired to nature. We need to get nature to work in cities.

I suppose there’s an entrepreneurial bit that’s important as well, because the challenge is in cities. There’s few places to plant, but there’s lots of. In the soil horizontally, but vertically there’s loads of space. So that’s. That’s kind of the entrepreneurial side. Well, how do we get plants to work on the size of buildings on top of buildings? Well, the size are more challenging. Well, we need to put a bit of technology there. We need some thought. And that’s fun because you could, you could the entrepreneurial appetite, and if you’re solving a meaningful problem with a simple and effective solution, well, then that’s what makes entrepreneurs tick, and it’s for the greater good. I’m not sure we can say we’re going to save the planet by bringing a little biodiversity into cities, but we’re certainly helping the war restaurants. So that I think there’s a bit of a jumbled answer. But the importance of what I do was different at different stages of my life, but right now it’s super important because we need to. Climate change is a big problem, but the lack of biodiversity is a bigger problem. Without biodiversity, we wouldn’t have any food, we wouldn’t have any fresh air or clean water. So, last point in this, there’s a chap called Jonas Salk, a well known American immunologist. We said that if all the insects were to disappear within 50 years, all life and Earth would end. If we were to disappear within 50 years, the planet would look amazing. But the irony is we wouldn’t be here to enjoy it.

[00:10:14] Jackie De Burca: Absolutely, absolutely. And in terms of insects disappearing, I have had a horse who unfortunately passed away at the end of last year, but had been with us for a long time before. And literally every single year, the test of the insect load was this horse, because, God bless him, the flies were all around him in the height of the summer, and each year just got less and less. So, you know, we are living in this very scary and challenging time, aren’t we?

[00:10:42] Angus Cunningham: Yes. Yes. Do you remember when we were young, Jackie? I know you’re massively younger than me.

[00:10:47] Jackie De Burca: Massively, absolutely.

[00:10:48] Angus Cunningham: It was the windscreen effect. When we drive anywhere, the windscreen wife was really colored because of windscreen splattered with insight.

[00:10:57] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, that’s it.

[00:10:59] Angus Cunningham: When you speak to the back of the windscreen, people don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s scary. There is hope, though. This isn’t a doom and gloom interview.

[00:11:07] Jackie De Burca: No.

[00:11:08] Angus Cunningham: Nature is so resilient. We just need to let it be and let it back in. And I think there’s time because we’re aware of it now and it’s the youngest of my children and their children who are going to have the bigger chance, but they’re being educated about it now. Our generation was. We felt threatened by nature. Cut back, trim, organize knee edges, repel it out of our cities. The generation, I was like, bring it in, bring it in, we need it.

[00:11:36] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, absolutely. Now. So just a typical day of Scotscape. What would that be, Angus, at the moment, now that you are, you know, the version of Scott scape that you are these days.

[00:11:47] Angus Cunningham: Oh, my God.

I’ve always been an early one, so I’m up at 5530.

My brain works best at that time of the day. So I come into work, I try and be organized with what I’ve got. The business has grown quite a bit, so I’m not directly involved. Apart from being the figurehead, I suppose, the business, the front person who’s got the passion and the drive and it’s not frightened to put the head above the parapet on LinkedIn.

I have to be organized. There are management meetings. We are self funded, so we need to be making money in order to survive. We don’t have a big company that’s plowing money into Scottsdale to keep us going and that is one of our big challenges.

We need to run a successful business in order to do the good that we’re doing. And it’s very challenging. Running a successful business.

It’s not easy when you’ve got a lot of staff, you’ve got a lot of rules, a lot of regulations.

I think if I’m asked by others who decide to go this self employed route, as I do, I think carefully because if I’d known how challenging it would be, I quite possibly would never have started.

But there again, that’s the same for most journeys. You start off on a journey, you have to deal with what comes away. But with running a business, you need to first go and find the work, so that’s off your back. Then you’ve got to carry out the work at a profit and then you’ve got to collect the money and if one of those three things don’t happen, you’ve got a problem. And that’s all I describe as plates on the end of a pole. So all those plates need to be spinning all the time. If one of them falls off, your business is going to be in jeopardy. So it’s difficult and you’re dealing with a lot of star and humans and human beings aren’t predictable and they have all good days, they have bad days, so it’s a challenge and I think, yeah, so anyone. That said, I think anyone can run a business, but to make money, running a business will only fail if you run out of money, because it’s easy to do jobs and manage stuff and do that. But if you’re not making money, you won’t have a business. So.

And a business would only fail if it doesn’t have money.

And it’s difficult. It’s difficult, and it’s a competitive environment, just to add. Anyway. So going back to what I do, I have to manage all these various aspects and make sure that all are functioning. And if there is a. And there’s not so much job satisfaction in that, because you tend to go where there’s a problem and where there’s a problem, there’s some adrenaline. You have to sort of think that. I love the front end. I love talking about what we do. I like being innovative. I love being an entrepreneur.

I like seeing stuff, our products out there doing good.

So that’s kind of my yin, my yang is the guts of the business. And I’ll tell you what, also running a business, as I got to 60, you don’t have so much energy. A successful businessman needs a load of energy all the time, especially when you’re starting to put those plates on the poles. You can’t just sit back and let it happen. You’ve got to keep pushing. So I hope I’ve answered the question, Jackie.

[00:15:24] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, no, that is perfect. And I guess what I’d like to do now, because you’ve been really honest and straightforward about their reality and, you know, whatever. Everything you say is absolutely true, Angus. But I guess what I’d like to do is focus on some of the more beautiful parts of the business. Just putting the nitty gritty to one side for the moment. And let’s talk about one or two of your works in the last year or two, or whatever comes to mind. Favorite works that you’ve done. Let’s talk about those and focus on something that’s very enjoyable.

[00:15:57] Angus Cunningham: It’s planting. We’ve been living. I first came across a living. We’re known for our living walls. Now that is my passion. So the garden maintenance, the commercial landscaping, the commercial maintenance, we’ve dropped when we’re no longer doing. And it allows us to focus on bringing our innovative products into cities. So it started with living walls. And we were buying from a nursery called Aldenborn, a lot of plants. And I went down there, this one. We were heavy into the big landscaping project, so I thought I’d go down and see them down there, because I hadn’t met them personally at this nursery. And he had a little patch of living wall up on his building. I thought, oh, my God, you can put plants on a building, because before that it was a climb up. You wanted to put plants, you plant into the ground up and went up.

I did get that rush of adrenaline. I thought, that’s just incredible. And the entrepreneur was going, yeah, can make money out of this. So that was my interest. 2008, they, Audingborne had brought this system in from North America. It was called by a company, they were called elevated landscape technology, and it was a plastic tray that had plants in it and you applied irrigation to it. The plants were grown. So that evolves from 2008 to now. We’ve had. We’ve moved on, but we’re still involved with living walls. We’ve got a different system that we work with. But the project that really floated my boat was when we were walking around in a London with Grover, and they were really keen to get some green into their patch of London commercially. Property prices would go up and rental incomes would go up. So there’s a commercial angle, obviously, that drives most products.

But Grosvenor wanted to be seen, and still want to be seen as the greenest landlord in London. They owned 300 acres of prime real estate in the middle of London. The smarter part to London, I think their vision was we’d love commuters recycling through our patch of green to go far too much money up. So we were quite excited about walking around and seeing where we could put some living walls. A whole day of walking. We couldn’t find one wallace to put greenery on because listed building party wall awards problem getting water to the plants, problem getting water away from the bottom so much. So many old buildings onto which you couldn’t put.

So we felt a bit despondent. But it was that the light bulb moment came out of that despondency, because we were standing up on a busy street, we thought, this is rubbish.

You can’t plant anyway. You can’t plant in the pavement because pavements were pedestrians. There’s too many services underneath the paving stones. You can’t plant the rows because they’re for traffic.

Oh, there’s a lamppost. What happened if you put planting on a lamppost? And then he thought, because our system we use is called phytotextile, it’s a fabric. So very flexible. Well, yeah, we could wrap that around the lamppost. And what happened if we put a tank at the bottom and actually wrap that around the lamppost? As well, so the water was sitting there and we could pump it up to the top and the idea was sown.

And from that, we developed our concept called the living pillar. And it’s been designed to go on lampposts, sustainable long term planting, powered by solar with tech in it. It’s tech that we use on living walls. It’s not brand new tech, but powered by solar is new. So we can communicate with the lamp post and we can make sure the parts are receiving the correct amount of water. AI, or clever software that manages the irrigation system. Because the city climate is not conducive to good plant health, you need to put water on at the right times and the right amount. So the living pillar concept was born. And I just love it. I love it because it’s innovative, it’s entrepreneurial, it solves a problem.

They’re definitely not there to replace trees. I am a tree hugger. I came out about this about ten years ago, climbed so many trees in my life. I love trees. But the challenge is you can’t plant trees in cities or certain cities, because there’s no room in the pavement to plant them. And more than that, councils are very concerned about root damage, etc, etcetera. So, trees are fantastic crate shade that can absorb pollution or disperse pollution, but the living pillar is to be put up where you can’t plant trees. And in my mind’s eye, I’ve got biodiversity corridor. Every city has been designed around roads and transport. Every road has lampposts.

So if you can put long term planting on lampposts, you can join up green spaces, you can bring some of the countryside in. And when I say biodiversity corridor, I’m not meaning wildebeest charging through the streets. We’re talking invertebrates, pollinators and birds will follow them, and we’ve shown that half that can happen. But, yeah, so the invertebrates can use the lamppost as feeding stations, another service stations. But in my entrepreneurial start in London, I made up hanging baskets in Victoria and hung around some pots, and it was good money and great fun, and I’m a fan.

And a hanging basket is a very innovative way of bringing some green into somewhere where otherwise you can’t plant. And they’ve been around forever. And my parents put them up, bizarrely, in our little village.

But when you come to biodiversity, they’re not great, because plants get changed once or twice a year. So any invertebrates that are establishing a life cycle, they’re killed when the plants change. Whereas if you can sustain long term planting, that is, on the lamppost, or on the building site. Doesn’t have to be a lamppost.

You can encourage invertebrates to hang about there. By putting perennial planting as opposed to annual planting on a lamppost, you get a wider range of pollinators and that’s important as well. So.

And then life cycles can happen. We. We hang insect and bird boxes on the living pillars. It’s a great message to the public. That’s what they’re about, but also their use. So, um. That. So a long story there, but that totally passionate about. We were. We were contacted by the Earthshot prize, Prince William’s competition, who suggested we put a ourselves forward, which we have done. So we’ll wait to hear in 2024. And commercially, we’ve registered the trademark and we have an international patent pending.

[00:23:03] Jackie De Burca: You have an international what?

[00:23:05] Angus Cunningham: Patent pending.

[00:23:06] Jackie De Burca: Brilliant.

[00:23:07] Angus Cunningham: We’ve applied. It takes forever. Patent seems to be very complex, especially post Covid, in this world of technology, because we’ve patented some of the technology involved in sustaining the healthy plants.

So it’s exciting because therefore you can see why it’s exciting. We can make some money out of it, we can bring biodiversity in, we can solve a problem.

And I get to look good, Jackie, after all these years of being a gardener.

[00:23:38] Jackie De Burca: Brilliant. Now, Angus, what about biodiversity net game? Because you’re talking obviously about, you know, your opportunities and what you’ve created.

Have you been dipping into that? Because, okay, it’s very early days, but we have technological solutions, we have a lot of, like, people kind of concerned about how it’s all going to work out, but, you know, presumably you can help there also.

[00:24:02] Angus Cunningham: Yeah. So that big for our market, a massive biodiversity net gain. But for those who don’t know it, it’s now a law that says if a developer is developing a plot of land, they’ve got to demonstrate they’re going to increase the biodiversity of that plot of land by a minimum of 10% over 35 years, mind you. So they’ve got a long time to do it. A minimum of $0.10. They won’t get planning permission unless they can demonstrate that they are able to increase the biodiversity net gain of that plot of land. Some councils are saying 20%, which is fantastic. But what their challenge is, they’re now running around thinking, oh, my God, how are we going to do this?

If you think about it, if you’ve got a footprint of land 20 meters by 20 meters, you’re going to put a building on 90% of that land. So the bit that’s left, you’ve got to increase the biodiversity by 100% because you’ve taken out a big rectangle in the middle. So that’s a challenge for the developers.

They’ve got three options. One, they put the green into that plot on the building, around the building, they buy biodiversity credits from the council, from the government, which means that they pay quite a lot of money, and the government then spends their money on some biodiversity project, or they get off site credits where they buy a patch of land somewhere in the countryside and they demonstrate that the biodiversity they couldn’t put into their development can actually happen on that plot of land. But I’m finding, so, as you can imagine, huge for our industry, because we all talked about it, but unless the developers have a sharp stick prodding them long, they’ve never do it because it costs the money. They don’t make so much and their shareholders get annoyed. So it is huge for our industry and just what was needed, and just in manipulation time.

So that’s biodiversity net gain, the urban greening factor. I think biodiversity is more for outside of towns, because if a developer is developing in a town, there’s very little biodiversity there to start off with. So they can’t. They’ve got an easy job, you know, increasing it by 10%. It might cook one little bit of planting in. So for towns, we’ve got the urban greening factor, which is a kind of a subset of the biodiversity net gain, which is measures, it’s measurable. So there’s a point scoring system and a metric. It’s about habitats and greenery and areas of greenery and types of greenery. For example, if you put auspicial lawn in, you get no points. If you put wildfire meadow in, you get, I think 0.7 of a .1 is a maximum. You put trees or water in, not a water feature. With chlorine builder pond, you get maximum point. So there’s a scoring system. So that is one we’re finding more and more in our world of biodiversity and sister death. The concentrate on the oven green factor. And I suppose the holy grail is if you say to a developer wants development together, you say, if you do this, this and this, here’s your point, you can do your development. They’ll say, yes, go.

And that’s the holy grail is turning our innovative living pillars or living walls into points. That helps. And I do say, if anyone’s looking to have a career advice, become an ecologist or a plants person. I was going to say plantsman, plants person.

Knowing your plants and what they do is so in the early days of Scotscape, when we had the maintenance round and tools on the tubes, I explained earlier we got into commercial landscaping for a developer to get permission to put landscaping up. The landscape architect would draw a bit of grass, a tree, a shrub, and that would be enough. Now we’ve been asked for how much nitrogen dioxide do those plants trap? How much biodiversity do they bring in? How much do they cost to maintain? How much carbon is sequestered, how many particulates are being absorbed? What does it look like at this time? What’s it huge? Absolutely. And so right and so necessary. So the biodiversity net gain being a shot of adrenaline in the arm of greening into cities. So fantastic for our industry. But I do add, we’ve got environmental, social governance, which is. Is also big, especially the e, the environmental s, the social, local employment. So if you’re putting fancy green in and it needs watering, then you’re getting some employment going there. B Corp status is another one, another standard about sustainability. But you know what I think, Jackie? The biggest driver is the consumer. And so the developer puts the building up and says, oh, I can’t put any green here. I have to do it off site. I don’t think people will move in because they want to be around green. So the bigger driver is you and me, who are deciding what they want to get involved with or buy. And if there’s more green there, you’re more likely to buy. I think the developer knows that.

[00:29:15] Jackie De Burca: This is something that I’ve discussed with other guests, actually, historically, you know, having land is associated with wealth and well being.

And now with the meta crisis that we’re all living through at the moment, people who weren’t maybe that knowledgeable about this, they’re really realizing it. So it’s highly desirable. So you’re absolutely correct. And right now, bNG only applies in England since the 12 February 2024. Of course, as I’m aware from guests and just seeing stuff online and so on, there’s a lot of the world are watching England to see how this is going to go. What you said about the urban greening, obviously, massively, massively important as well. So it’s kind of like a watch this space, really, isn’t it?

[00:30:02] Angus Cunningham: It is, yeah. Singapore is ahead of the curve with Green of Moscow and have a look.

But I was told not so long ago by west, we do a fair bit of work with Westminster and we’re trying to live in Westminster, that all the big cities look at each other and see what they’re up to. I think it’s New York, Paris, Milan, Tokyo and London. I don’t know. I don’t know where they came from, the big five. And they all look at each other and say, what are you doing to make a difference? What are you doing? So there is a little bit of ego in there with regards to. No, we’ve got the best innovative way to bring green in, and that’s a good, healthy competition. Especially. We’re in London, center of the world. I shouldn’t say that. Being a Scotsman.

I do. I’ve been here long enough.

On the last question. Biodiversity net game urban greenhouse B Corp status, environmental and social governance. Just quickly, on the, on the ESG, we. I have a good. The big players, the corporates, this is sort of touching on greenwashing, want to be seen to be doing green. And the company shall remain nameless. But I know someone quite high up in a manufacturing company, the manufacturer shirts. And he said to me, he knows what I do. He said, oh, we’re really green.

We plant a load of trees. I thought, that’s great. I love trees.

What happens? Tell me about it. He said, well, we pay a company over there to plant trees in South America.

I said, why did you do that? They said, well, because it’s much cheaper and we get more bang for our bucks. And why aren’t you planting them in this country? Bonkers.

They’ve changed a bit. And then we’ve got involved some other stuff. So. And they shall remain nameless. I thought, this is the environmental. Social governance is super important. Financial markets will are more likely to take note of and invest in someone with a high esg rating. So I think that that is the super big driver for the big players who want to be green. I mean, I said to this guy, why don’t you plant trees in schools? Because Scottsdale are involved in microforests, in using the Miyawaki method. It’s on our website where you plant trees very densely with some clever ground preparation. We took one visit, it’s actually logic, it’s low tech. Once you plant it, you’re off and running. I said, why don’t you plant some microforest in schools? Because the microforest we planted in Islington, we got a school involved to plant the trees and put worms in the inner city. Children loved it.

Because if you, mister corporate, say, oh, I’m spending all this money in South America, we’re not getting the benefit of it. And basically, as far as I’m telling you, ticking a box, if you planted in a school, we can educate the school kids. You get a forest in an inner city because these forests can maybe be a tennis court size or a bit smaller.

You get all the carbon. No, trees are big, as we know. We don’t want to plant a tree. You’ve got. Everyone wins. The kids get educated. You get seen to be giving back. You get seen to be doing good.

We put more trees in. We’re gonna. And then using a bit of software called eye trees, which the mayor of London uses, you can provide all this data about how much good the trees are doing from trapping carbon absorbing particulates, tracking nitrogen dioxide, tracking carbon monoxide, the whole gambit. And it’s also. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s frustrating. The big.

I’m not going to shift the mindset of a big corporate, but it doesn’t make sense to me to be doing all that good. Obviously, they can come and do it in Spain. Jackie, I know you have a vested interest in parts of Spain, so. But no, seriously, it’s just silly.

Spend your money in this country.

[00:34:05] Jackie De Burca: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, one question, Angus, that comes into my mind is why do you only work in cities?

[00:34:15] Angus Cunningham: Yeah, good question.

I think the short answer is, because I live here and I’m selfish.

I live here. I live in one, I live in London.

I am a country lad of my formative years until I was 20, when I headed to London, was spent in the southern uplands, the ranger hills running across Scotland. And I always saw myself as an estate manager in those days, cutting down trees turned into planting them. Cities are where I mentioned this at the beginning of where most of population are growing and where I live, where opportunities are. They drive economy, so they’re really, really important. And the population is growing and that growth is going to cities. So they’re not the best places to live from air pollution point of view and the greenery point of view. So we work in cities because that’s where the opportunities are. That’s where we’re going to get best bang for our box and make a difference quickly.

And it ticks my innovative and entrepreneurial boxes. And I think in the countryside there’s another big challenge. It’s only one of us, and if we spread ourselves too thin, we’re not going to go anywhere. But, yeah, the countryside’s another a whole nother challenge. So we’re based in a city.

That’s where we operate and where we can do the most good quickly.

[00:35:42] Jackie De Burca: We talked already about your living pillars, but you do have other innovations. Angus, do you want to talk about those.

[00:35:49] Angus Cunningham: Yes, I think the microforest that I’ve just mentioned is a big one for me because it uses low tech and it means planting trees, which I’m passionate about. And bear in mind our innovative staff, although it resonates with me in the business and it does a lot of good, we’re having to be innovative because there’s no west bark trees, but where you’ve got a corner of a park or a patch of green you can plant. I mean, the word forest is a bit romantic, isn’t it? But they’re not. They’re called microforests, but really they’re copses or spinnies of trees, often no bigger than a tennis court size. You get all the ecology growing in a tennis court size. We use the miawaki method. Akira Miyawaki, a bit like Patrick Blanc, was for living walls. An entrepreneur who pushed the boundaries. Akira Miyawaki pushed a boundary stuff. His sort of mission on raison d’etre of being on this planet was to get trees to grow well in very poor soil. And he developed a methodology of planting trees very densely close together. He would excavate the area down to maybe 500 mil, 50 in old money, get local rotten foodstuffs that have been chopped out, lay it in the bottom, push all the soil back, plant very small trees very closely together, mulch it with. It was straw in those days that you can use. Use the bark mulch and then just let it. Let nature take over. And that. That resonated with me because I’ve done it at home. I’ve hung some living wall panels on the side of my property with wheat treated compost in there and said, nature, just go do what, do your worst with it. And I’ve got cherry trees growing out of it. I’ve got ferns. I’ve got a whole wide range of what we would call weeds. That’s. Oh, no, I think.

But it’s green. So nature has dropped the green in. So with the microforest, it’s the same thing. We kick start nature. It’s kind of town rewilding or city rewilding. And rewilding is a marathon starting with a sprint. So you put a lot of energy in to plant the tree, and then you just let it be. You just let nature take over. So the twist we’ve done the sort of entrepreneurial, innovative thing we’ve done with our microforest. We don’t dig up the soil because that’s very labor intensive. It releases carbon into the air and it’s costly. So what we’ve done, and again, you can’t go on our website and have a look. We’ve got a case study. We inject high pressure air into the area to break up the subsoil. Then using the same needle, injection needle. It’s a method using. For decompacting around trees to help root spread. So then using the same needle will pump in biochar, organic nutrients and mycorrhiza. And they will keep the fissures open and provide all the goodness that a forest needs, needs. And then we’ll spread approximately 150 mil depth of mineral and rich topsoil over the whole area. So there’s no digging whatsoever. And in that, that top layer of soil, which is very friable and easy to plant into, we plant cell grown trees.

Now, there’s a number of reasons for that, but the main one is we have a huge success rate with cell growing trees because the roots aren’t damaged.

Secondly, we can.

[00:39:15] Jackie De Burca: Well, let me jump in there. Let me jump in there, Angus. The name of those trees, again, cell grown.

[00:39:20] Angus Cunningham: So they’re grown. It’s a method of growing trees. They’re grown in little tiny pots, like an egg box.

[00:39:28] Jackie De Burca: Okay?

[00:39:28] Angus Cunningham: They’re from six inches to twelve inches tall, and the roots are contained in this little egg. Imagine an egg box with six growing, and you take the tree out, so all the roots around in a little bundle, they’re nothing. You can pop them into the. Literally pop them there. Very old fashioned, my age. Just pop it in there, pop to the box, plant them into the topsoil.

And children can do it because you’re not planting into heavy clay or using a big spade. And it’s hard work. You’re planting very small trees into four to six inches of topsoil. And then. So we plant them really close together, same as the Miyawaki method. To encourage competition, the children, we brought worms in on this particular case study in Islington, and each of the children popped up a worm. That popped again. Put a worm in with the tree.

Because if we’re doing all this goodness and prepare preparation, you need to put some worms in there to get the cycles going, to keep the. Keep the air going into the substance, take the goodness from above down, so that nature, as I say, it’s a sprint followed by a marathon. And then once we planted the trees, we’ll mulch it all.

On that particular project, I went back six months later and some of the trees had grown to over six foot tall.

But it was more than that. The amount of. And we fenced it off using some chestnut fencing. The amount of greenery that cropped up amongst the trees, it’s like an oasis of green in a corner of a. Not the most attractive park, it’s dog walkers Park.

A year later, the trees are over 2 meters tall. So it’s just incredible that you. And we’re just. All we’re saying is that we’re giving this bit back to nature.

We plant high canopy, mid canopy and low canopy trees and ground cover. So there’s a little bit of thought, but not a lot of thought of where they’re positioned. So we literally mix and match them throughout the whole area. Plant really closely together. There will be some failures, but there’s competition and that’s why the trees are growing so quickly and that’s what happens in nature.

[00:41:44] Jackie De Burca: That’s fascinating.

[00:41:46] Angus Cunningham: On the side of my building, you say, I’ll give you a plot, I’ll give you a kickstart.

[00:41:51] Jackie De Burca: That’s fascinating. Now, going back to your website, we will obviously be adding it to the episode page I and on the podcast directories and all that type of stuff. But for those listening, just as a reminder, it’s Scotscape and it’s co dot UK or what have I got exactly?

[00:42:10] Angus Cunningham: Funny story, because when I start, I was very naive. When I came to London and Scottsgate came about, we were myself another scotsman called Richie, and we were living above a garage in south London. Clapham. Yeah. There’s another story how we got there. It’s like a massive shed of a panel beaters garage. And the landlord said to me, I need to send you an invoice. I said, what’s an invoice? I had no clue. Honestly, Jackie, I don’t know how I’ve got to where I’ve got to. Sometimes I got to send an invoice. What’s that? I said, he said, it was a bit of paper that says, you owe me money. I said, what do I owe you money for? He said, rent. Okay, okay. So I get the process, but I need to make the invoice out to someone. Who do I make it out to? And at that time, we didn’t have a name, although we were doing our garden main. And he said, well, you’re both scottish landscapers, why don’t we just call you Scott Scape?

[00:43:03] Jackie De Burca: Oh, brilliant.

[00:43:06] Angus Cunningham: You can spend all this money on marketing and this and that, but that.

[00:43:09] Jackie De Burca: Would have cost you thousands in an agency.

Brilliant. So what challenges, Angus, do you face now when integrating these green solutions into your urban environments, particularly when it comes to the likes of sustainability and maintenance.

[00:43:25] Angus Cunningham: Yeah.

The challenges are client approval of what you’re doing and assurance that they’re going to last the course.

And then you’ve got to be competitive as well because there’s other living royal companies out there.

We haven’t got a monopoly, we have enough pillars, but not on our living wall system. So it’s a commercial environment. So, yeah, it’s tough, this rule, as I mentioned earlier, rules and regs. So, yeah, I think the biggest challenge is putting your plants in, making sure they’re maintained correctly and running the business that delivers that service, because running any businesses, hard work.

I think the other challenge, when you’re bringing new products into the market, that’s been a steep learning curve for me, because you don’t just suddenly start with a new product. With the living pillars, there have been five years of research and development. There’s been what we call intelligent failures, where you have to try things, figure they don’t work, try something else. And that all comes out of your own cash.

No one is providing you money.

There are some tax credits from the revenue, admittedly, but. But that comes a couple of years later. You have to provide the cash to do this. And if you’re not making money as a business, no matter how excited or passionate you are about your product, it’s not going to go anywhere because you haven’t got the money to put into it. So I think that that, for me, is the biggest challenge because it is my passion to find clever ways to bring green in. But when you haven’t got the cash to develop it and when you’re demanding cash, but you’ve got to pay your suppliers and your business comes first, it’s incredibly frustrating. So I think, personally, that’s my biggest challenge. I wish there was a wealthy benefactor out there saying, yeah, love what you do. Yeah, hundreds of thousands of times, go and save the planet.

The utopia for me, if you know anyone, Jackie.

[00:45:36] Jackie De Burca: Well, you put it out there now, you never know, obviously, Angus, you never know.

In the same way as like, retrofitting in buildings. Surely there should be on the way. I know it’s not long. We’re recording the middle of August 2024. It’s not long since a new government has arrived, obviously, into the parliament buildings in the UK. So early days. But will there not be some nice grants available and bits and pieces. Is there nothing on the horizon to.

[00:46:05] Angus Cunningham: Fit your can of worms jacket?

[00:46:07] Jackie De Burca: Have I? Oh, no.

[00:46:08] Angus Cunningham: Well, only. Only so much that five years ago I thought we didn’t do any local authority work. I thought, well, let’s make some inroads, figure out how it works. It’s like. It’s like wading through treacle, honestly. Maybe I’ve been running a company. You get to make decisions and generally they happen and you can influence things.

Local government, honestly, I don’t know. Anything gets done sometimes. That said, there’s some very passionate people there, but who know the ropes and the rules, but the bureaucracy is incredibly slow.

That said, I think there are what we found and I’m not sure if this government is making a bigger difference than the old government because local government seems to be another aspect of it, or whether you. What political persuasion you are in. Local government makes a difference to the.

[00:47:06] Jackie De Burca: I can certainly jump in and say that in my tiny experience, because, of course, you know, it’s. It’s not a big, huge organisation. Constructive voices. I can certainly say that Cambridgeshire seems to have a lot of genuine action and things happening when it comes to this area, not specifically your area, I can’t say that for sure. But they are doing some great work there. I can say.

[00:47:32] Angus Cunningham: That’s really good to hear. We’ve been more in London. Maybe I should get some emails out there. We have on a big positive we that seems to be pockets of money that each individual council can access. So they have their own ways of accessing icons to bring. I think head government say, okay, we’re going to make this amount of money available and what it’s going to be available for is to clean the air or bring biodiversity.

So councils have access to that. Wandsworth and Westminster have been very good to us, but I hear they’re slightly wealthier borrowers. So there’s obviously some sort of catch that some borrowers are in a better position than others. But I haven’t figured out why.

But there is money available. The challenge for us, Jackie, there’s a big one. The money’s available for installation, but often it’s not there for maintenance and all what we do. Plants need maintenance. You can’t just put it up and go away. You can’t put them up and say, right, that’s it, job done. They need maintained and we need technology often to maintain them.

That’s a big challenge.

[00:48:44] Jackie De Burca: So that’s. It’s interesting because when it comes to BNG, my understanding is, of course, with the 30 plus years that has to be worked into, so why should it be any different for urban greening?

[00:48:55] Angus Cunningham: Good question.

Something. I don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:48:59] Jackie De Burca: Okay.

[00:49:01] Angus Cunningham: But, yeah, it’s, uh. Yeah, I hope this government makes a difference. I hear. I hear stories that they’re looking cut back and it’s been over egged. But then, yeah, if you’ve got a cat like Cambridge, you’ve got a lot of people there who want to do good. They seem to always make things happen. So maybe there’s hope.

[00:49:21] Jackie De Burca: Hopefully there’s hope.

[00:49:22] Angus Cunningham: Yeah, we’ve got solutions.

[00:49:25] Jackie De Burca: Certainly Cambridgeshire seem like an excellent example from what I know so far. So, listen, going back to the likes of the emerging trends in green infrastructure, what are you most excited about? Putting to one side? Financials for a moment.

[00:49:41] Angus Cunningham: Yeah. What do you mean? What am I excited about?

[00:49:44] Jackie De Burca: In emerging trends within green infrastructure.

[00:49:51] Angus Cunningham: You mean the trend of bringing green into cities? I’m just generally excited that if there’s a demand to bring green in and we’re at the forefront of this industry, we get to exercise what we’ve been doing for the last ten years before it was topical.

So, yeah, for us it’s plants. And I suppose when you ask the question, it’s about the greening industry, the whole sustainability thing wrapped up in it as well, and using less fossil fuel.

But I think the most exciting thing is going to my vision of a city. You’re halfway to completing my vision by bringing green into Sydney.

[00:50:43] Jackie De Burca: Yes, that’s a fuller question, which I think we should get to in a moment.

We’ll probably finish our chat on that one. But I had this random idea as you were speaking there, Angus. How would it be. Would it not be functional at all to grow the likes of, we’ll say, coriander and basil and different herbs out of like a lamppost? Is that.

[00:51:04] Angus Cunningham: Yeah, it’d be great. Well, you can.

[00:51:06] Jackie De Burca: Can you?

[00:51:07] Angus Cunningham: I think, yeah. Berries are good for your strawberries, your raspberries, your blackberries, your blackcurrants.

They. They all grow out of our system and then grow. If you can reach up, you could pluck them out. Vegetables, not so good, the brassicas, because they look a bit messy at different times of the year. So I wouldn’t advise to grow, although they do grow well in our fish. I would just caveat it by saying that the amount of pollution in our cities, probably not. Not great to.

I mentioned this earlier about roads. Did cities design around roads? If you were to remove cars from the equation, that’s the best way to remove pollution from cities. I would suggest plant lots of berries on your lamp. Personally, you go around eating them.

[00:51:56] Jackie De Burca: That’d be fantastic, wouldn’t it?

[00:51:58] Angus Cunningham: Isn’t it, we call them brambles, or blackberries, I think they call them, but they’re doing well in the parts of south London at the moment. So bramble and apple pie is being made, but it reconnects you with nature because before cities, before the industrial revolution, that’s what we did. And haven’t we just lost touch with. You can go out and pick fruit. We’re just so used to seeing it in a package in a supermarket. You forget where it comes from and then you probably get quite surprised seeing how it’s commercially produced. But going into the countryside and picking fruit or vegetables is just how it, how it was. We just, we said, what’s it called? A shifting baseline. You know, it’s always moving. But go back 300 years and, you know, before the industrial revolution, we all, pockets of homesteads and self sufficiency, that’s gone.

[00:52:53] Jackie De Burca: It’s not that long ago. I mean, I’ve said this to other guests as well, Angus, you know, it’s not that long ago. If you think of it just through your own family, depending on the, you know, the, the length of how long people live within your family, we’re talking just like, whatever, four, five, six generations, depending, so it’s not that long. Now. Finally, though, Angus, what is your vision for future, future cities?

[00:53:16] Angus Cunningham: Oh, that was coming to cover the, COVID our cities with green. Just to have, you know, when you see aerial shots or say, oh, hi, like drone footage of a city, I see these amazing buildings as I’ve got to my eyes think, crikey, what have we done?

There was a forest. Look at all these monstrosities. So I, my vision is to cover them all with green because then you, you’ve not just gone f off nature into this bit and say, I’ve excluded you. There was a part there and a part there, but the rest is just massive glass and concrete buildings saying, look how great we are. Cover them with green, and then we’ve got half a chance. So I think verdant has to come into my vocabulary at that point. So a verdant covering a verdant blanket of green over all our cities, I think that would be, be my vision. Roads, you know, use the underground, just, you know, use a bike. I got on a, on a forest bike the other day and I thought, I haven’t been on one. I’ve got incredible, you know, no pollution you can anyway, so lots of, no cars, lots of bicycles, lots of walking. Certain roads turned into biodiversity corridors which are nothing but green, so allow people to walk everywhere. Walking dead for you as well, so. Yeah, but I think the overarching vision is a blanket of verdant green over all our cities. And let nature look at us. Nature can be up high in the building. Let it look at us down on the ground, walking around, as opposed to us doing it the other way, looking at nature.

[00:54:59] Jackie De Burca: Fantastic. So what a wonderful way to end with your vision. Angus has been really interesting talking to you. This is constructive voices.