THE PLANTS OUTSIDE MY HOUSE - LATE JUNE 2022

It's almost half way through the year. I've spent most of it either in hospital or recovering - first pneumonia, then with a broken hip. (I now have a metal one.) So . . . I have little energy and can't walk far. On the other hand, I am grateful to be alive, to be breathing and able to walk at all.

Last July, I pottered outside my house and took a look at the plants growing either side of my front door. I can manage that I thought! I'd say 'hello' and do a repeat - hoping you can't remember what was there last time because although plants vanish or die back over winter, they tend to reappear the next year - except just at the moment it isn't as sunny as it was then. In fact, this year has been pretty cold for the season and my plants have been objecting.

One of the reasons I'm glad I live where I live is that no-one minds that my plants are a mixture of recognisable garden varieties and wild plants. What counts as a 'weed' varies from location to location. At my allotment, foxgloves are frowned on. But I love foxgloves so I collected seeds from a hedgerow - and grew them on outside my house. Bees agree - they are a 'good' thing.

Most people would accept the little 'Sweet Dreams' rose to be a 'garden' plant. It's colour is fabulous but I wish it could have a less drippy name. Last year the clusters were larger but individual flowers were smaller. Perhaps there is a reason for doing the same post a year apart. It means I note these things. The colour of the light is different too.

For Christmas a year ago, I was given wild flower seeds in small clay pellets. That spring I carefully planted them in the small amount of earth I have available beside the pavement and added labels to say which insects or creatures would be likely to be attracted to them - bees, bats, hedgehogs etc. (Hedgehogs? Am I right?) None grew. But I also pressed some into pots they could share with other plants - the rose, bamboo, a little bay tree. These pellets lay inert for a year then decided to follow the example of Jack's beans in the beanstalk story. Who knew clover could be so huge? Not me! I had to hack it back before it enveloped everything. The pretty white flowers tangled in with the rose can stay for the moment. I don't know what they are but they seem to complement it. Next year I'll return to the less cluttered 'look'.

The aquilegia 'Red Hobbit' isn't as dramatic as in previous years. Fewer flowers per plant and they seem to be smaller. However, there are more plants so I'm not too disappointed.

Candytuft has self-seeded. Some white. Some purple. I shall encourage more to grow next year. It slips in happily below the tall alliums which used to be purple . . . 

. . . and which have now turned into fireworks on stems. A bit in the way ivy does. I'm enjoying the way autumn is already beginning - before we've even got very far with our so-called summer.

At this point it started to rain. The wind sprung up and all the geranium plants began to fall of the walls and the pot with a rosemary bush began to roll lopsidedly down the street. Photography session over. This is one of the challenges with mini urban gardens. Plants which don't like too much water get too light too easily and a few gusts can rearrange the whole thing. I put away my camera and packed the pots into a cluster along the foot of the wall - stable. All colour had gone from eye level. Tomorrow, I'll put them back again. Can't think of a gardening book that mentions this.

Hi everyone!

THE PLANTS OUTSIDE MY HOUSE

HOVERFLY - Eupeodes corollae -
This photo is not from today but from 16th June.
There are many wild flowers growing in my street.
This ragwort is one of them.
I'm really fortunate in my neighbours for
they value wild plants as well as garden flowers
and vegetables; so ragwort, willow herb, buttercups and
dandelions are all left in place to grow and flower
in season.

This is an indulgent post. I walked out of my front door a few times today, took photos for the record and came back in again.

I have no garden, just a few square feet between the house and a little wall, beyond which is the pavement. Some of this gap is covered with a huge stone slab which does as a front path. To one side, there is concrete. To the other a tiny patch of earth - a few square feet where, at present, there are nigella turning into seed heads and poppies newly opened today. Mostly my plants are in pots - lots of them; small and large, within this confined space then along the pavement and down the street!

Here are some of them:

'Sweet Dream' rose from David Austin.

Throughout the day the light has been intensifying, the heat growing. The plants change in appearance. First thing in the morning, roses look ethereal.

The same plant later in the day.

Later in the day they mature decadently. It's as if they've put on thick make-up.

 Candytuft by the front door looks pretty when the light is thin.

The candytuft on an old lintel glows through the shade as the sun moves round.

While I was watering nasturtiums growing up a little bay tree, a neighbour asked if I'd been having 'trouble with teenagers' recently. 'Not at all,' I replied. (Little knowing!) "It's just that two or three weeks ago they were taking the soil from your pots to throw at the police." I've been watching bees and hoverflies. Urban living!

Last summer I collected seeds from foxgloves growing beside the road. The huge results are now in a large pot. No flowers yet.

* * * 

A bit of housekeeping:

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https://looseandleafyinhalifax.blogspot.com/

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LISTER LANE CEMETERY, HALIFAX, CALDERDALE, ENGLAND

My gardening gloves at the allotment disintegrated during
the long months of recovery from leukaemia when I could not touch
soil because of the microbes living in it.

I'll begin with apologies. I don't mean to be continually starting and stopping. It just happens. There are so many things to do! I've begun going to my allotment again. I've been fighting a battle with rats in my house. I spend a lot of time picking up litter in my neighbourhood. I take photos and write posts in my head - but never get round to putting them on screen. Be assured, though, that I am not forgetting you.

In my head, I planned a whole series of posts about how the terrain changes as we climb up from the river and canal at the foot of the hill, through the town and up to the moor. I was watching to see when the dandelions opened on the different levels. I was going to tell you but . . . 

Doorstep on 1st June 2021

When it came to June I thought I would take part in the '30 Days Wild' challenge with the Wildlife Trusts. I tidied up outside my front door so I could happily sit on the step to have breakfast on the first day and look around at the plants and creatures which happened to be there. Indeed, I did sit on my doorstep for breakfast that day . . . but got distracted by the adventures of a relative who was trying to get back to England after working in Austria and there are so many hospital appointments to go to and neighbours to chat to and spikey things to be pulled out of wooden floorboards and all sorts of other distractions in daily life that . . . well . . . the days go by . . . and I've not been writing any 'wild' posts for June.

The languages on the notice at the entrance to Lister Lane Cemetery gives you clues
about our neighbourhood - English, Urdu, Bengali and Czech.

However, one thing I did do recently was to visit Lister Lane Cemetery on 31st May when it was awash with aquilegia. 

Lister Lane Cemetery awash with aquilegia, May 31st 2021 

Every year it is awash with something . . . poppies, evening primrose, foxgloves . . . something striking and everywhere. This year, it's aquilegia.

The chapel no longer has a roof. Instead, it has bee hives!

In other years I've peered through the gates but only once before have I been in. On that occasion one of the interesting things about it was that there was a set of stocks - the old kind of punishment where people were fixed between planks of wood at their wrists and at their ankles so anyone who felt like it could throw rubbish at them - old fruit and stuff. I doubt the Friends of Lister Lane Cemetery who look after it nowadays had really been having fun at the expense of their less popular neighbours but it was a surprising piece of 'street furniture' to come across all the same!

Lister Lane Cemetery in Halifax was opened in 1841 as a commercial enterprise. As someone who grew up familiar with Church of England country churchyards the idea of a burial place as a money-making scheme came as something of a surprise. But the conventional churchyards of the town at the time were jam-packed and lives were short and some people were unwelcome in the religious graveyards even in death and they were found places in Lister Lane - people who committed suicide, people of different denominations. 

I am struck forcefully by how closely
many of the graves are packed together. Just enough space
for these flowers to grow between.

Forget-me-nots between paving stones in a wide
walkway leading to the chapel ruins.

The soot on the obelisks, the way the graves are crammed together, the stories told in the engravings . . . the cemetery still says something about what life was like here in the nineteenth century - dark, crowded, brief, rich with experience. 

All sorts of people were rammed in, wealthy and poor, with crisply cut, durable gravestones and obelisks, walkways for the living, a sense of welcome and peace and now, thanks to the those who tend it, the graves are covered in flowers. Even the paths have flowers sprouting out of them. It's one of the wonderful things about the 'Calderdale Style'. Even in local parks there's a relaxing and admirable mixture between the formal and informal, the cultivated and the wild.

I'm hoping you will like it here as much as I do for we will be returning!

Ivy-leafed Toadflax on steps at the cemetery.

The last burial at Lister Lane was in 1963 - when the mills were still belching out smoke. 

The other day a neighbour described coming home from work on a bus in a smog of the 1960s. The smog was so thick the driver couldn't see where he was going. The conductor had to get out and walk a couple of feet ahead - and beckon to show it was safe for the bus to move forward. We now live in different times. The air has cleared, the skies are often blue (and there is less snow).

California poppies and Aquilegia.

There's an open day every year on 4th July - with guided tours of the cemetery. If you are in the area you might like to take part. Here's a link.

And you might also like to follow the twitter account of The Friends of Lister Lane Cemetery where the graves are listed over time and the lives of the people who lie there narrated.

__________

Description of Halifax 1810 - 1850 on 'From Weaver to Web' 

(An Online Visual Archive of Calderdale History)

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A DANDELION TO WATCH

I can see this dandelion from my kitchen window. I watch it as the months go by - while the water runs warm into the sink, while I wait for the kettle to boil, when I look down the street to see how much traffic there is . . . 

From now on, you can watch it with me. It doesn't do much but remarkably, notably and all-on-its-ownedly . . . it's there.

So we'll see what it will do.

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MOSSES AND LICHENS on a dry stone wall.

This little plant (plant?) takes only a couple of square centimetres of space.

 You know that feeling of awe and joy which swells so large in your chest that it blocks your throat and you can't speak? You turn away and the world calms. Then you look back and the same thing happens. This great big bubble fills your breathing space and all you can do is smile and be happy? That happened to me this morning when I paused by a wall, rich in mosses and lichens - and caught sight of this tiny space of red filaments.

It was quite extraordinary, how many types of moss and lichen were there on that wall.

Mostly, when I come across so many things I don't know about, I start searching the internet to find their names. By the time I've found them the month has marched on and I fail to post about them. With mosses and lichens I have reached a stage of release otherwise known as 'giving up'. I will never know what they all are. I will never understand them. I will just marvel and enjoy them.

When photographing these, I didn't move a foot. So in that sense, it's a 'Stuck Foot Post'. But in another it's far short of that. There were so many mosses and lichens on these few square feet of wall, I have not shown them all. I didn't even begin to look at the other plants.

 This wall is not far from the village of Wainstalls in West Yorkshire. It's on the border between moorland and farmland. On one side of the narrow road there's rough grass and little streams. On the other there are sheep grazing in fields with dry stone walls around them - like this one - descending into the comparative lushness of a valley. It's all very steep. And this morning it was almost immersed in mist.

I'd begun higher up. But higher up was completely blanked out. Everything except an occasional small thorn tree had vanished behind whiteness. Oddly, though, I kept thinking I could see tall, bare branched trees ahead. My mind was creating them.

Lichens and mosses on this small piece of wall are packed together; intermingled. Each half stone seems to be a tiny and varied garden.

 Some of the mosses were neat and self-contained. Almost like cactuses.

 Some lichens were spread out like stars.

There were rows of elphin cups.

 And distinct circles.

 Mountain slopes on a minuscule scale.

And stark, exotic, rocky landscapes, all on a wall.

Of course, I would like to know what these lichens and mosses are so I'm hoping some of you will be able to tell me.

And I'll come full circle, returning to the wonderful red filaments which first caught my eye.

All photographs in this post were taken on 9th March 2021

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