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.

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A bit of housekeeping:

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WELCOMING THE VISITORS

Scruffy hart's tongues ferns in wall. June 1st 2020.

Do you remember this picture?

It's of bedraggled Hart's Tongue ferns in the wall outside my house on 1st June 2020.

Something apparently unconnected; do any of you read Karen Gimson's blog? (Recommended!) Well, at the beginning of March, Karen was giving away a Hozelock Bokashi Composter and I 'won' it by leaving a comment and my name came out of the hat.

This kind of composter lives indoors. There are no worms but a sort of magical sawdust that you sprinkle onto food you put in the large-bucket sized, grey and yellow plastic box. Incredibly, it can be cooked as well as uncooked food, animal as well as vegetable. (Even bones.) I haven't been very adventurous with it. I find I am conservative about what I think 'ought' to go into a compost bin and these conventions are hard to overcome. However, feeling rather brave, adventurous and reckless even I have included pasta from time to time. It's now got to the point where I must get someone to dig a hole in the ground at my allotment and bury the contents. (Perhaps I will ask them to sing mystical chants while they do it!) But in between then and now, twice a week, I have opened a tap at the bottom and let a slightly yellow, slightly cabbagy smelling liquid flow out. I've diluted it with water and poured it over the hart's tongue ferns using a little red watering can with a long, thin spout - rather like an old fashioned oil can.

The same hart's tongue ferns on 1st August 2020/

And this is the result!

All previous hart's tongue ferns I have come across have been growing on woodland slopes or at the edge of county ditches where there would always be some kind of decaying vegetation. These must have been hungry as well as thirsty. Just look at them now! Not only have the original ones revived, more have appeared - presumably encouraged by the dribble of water and nutrients through the channels of old mortar. I've just counted forty. FORTY!

Petty spurge. 1st August 2020

Because of the rules of the pandemic and my lack of immunity to the bacteria in soil I have still not been able to visit my allotment but I'm trying to make the most of the little area outside my house. Fortunately, it's at the dead end of a blocked off street so the large pots I've placed along the pavement don't get in anyone's way. As well as extending growing space this has the advantage of expanding the distance between me (on my doorstep) and anyone who might be passing by. (Virus anti-sociability!) There's also a little concreted area where trays can go and a tiny patch of earth 70 inches by 22 inches. (I've just measured it.) During June, one of our two cats died. We buried her there and sprinkled four kinds of flower seeds which sprang up and were promptly eaten by slugs. I had some spare red kale plants whose leaves are pretty as well as edible so I planted them instead. Slugs ate them! I had grown rudbeckia from seed. I put them there. Slugs ate them! Never mind. Instead of bright colours, I have a little army of petty spurges. They just arrived. I didn't plant the hart's tongue ferns, I didn't plant the petty spurge. The big deal is that slugs and pests are avoiding both and both are now happily growing. I have a garden!

Small foxglove plant. 1st August 2020

Foxglove seeds had fallen from the garden in Dorset into a couple of pots which came with me when I moved to Halifax. Slugs and snails ignore them. They have flowered and dropped extra seed. Now transplanted into the earth, hopefully these new plants will flower next year. There are lots of foxgloves growing wild locally. When they start to drop seeds I'll collect some so I will have even more. Whatever grows (almost whatever grows!) is welcome!

Aquilegia. 5th June 2020

Remember this picture? It is of some rather exotic looking aquilegia growing nearby. I've collected seeds from them and sprinkled them on the earth. Hopefully, they will grow and I will have exotic flowers outside my house too next June. (I've kept some in an envelope and can start them in pots in spring if I need a fall back.)

Small, self-sown cyclamen now put in pots. 1st August 2020.

The trouble with cats is that they like sitting on things and my remaining cat is an enthusiastic window-box-plant-squasher. Last year I planted cyclamen in the window boxes. Squashed! Dead! Breaking my arm didn't help. I couldn't water things as much as they needed. But eight baby cyclamen have sprung up in their place. Two I've left in the boxes. The other six I am now nurturing in separate pots. Of their own accord they are perpetuating the line. They are welcome!

Lobelia flowering in stripey Yucca pot. 1st August 2020

This pot came with me from Dorset. It contains a stripy Yucca plant and a foxglove seedling. Also some lobelia. The lobelia came from Dorset - at least, its ancestors did. I bought a few plants several years ago and they have been self-seeding ever since.

Geranium in pot. Grown on from plug. 1st August 2020.

And last, but not least, geraniums. I have not been into a shop for months but Diana at Elephant's Eye on False Bay pointed out that the large windows in my house might have been intended with a weaver in mind and that weavers traditionally had geraniums in their window boxes. How could I resist? I looked online but geraniums seemed very expensive so I asked my neighbour to keep an eye out for me in the local shops and she came across a wonderful bargain - eighteen plug plants for £1:77! Enough for her to have some on her windowsills too.  I've potted them up and when they get round to flowering we will have a right gaudy and joyous display at our end of the street.

More hart's tongue ferns in the same brick wall. 1st August 2020.

Sorry, I'm so chuffed with the hart's tongue ferns I need to show you another group in the same wall.

Nature, in the form of lack of water, of slugs and snails can be destructive. But there can be hardly anywhere in this country where absolutely nothing will grow. I will not necessarily be able to have the plants I first thought of but nature (and my neighbour!) are filling the gaps. What grows is welcome. Plants which choose to be here of their own accord or are from the immediate environs are those most likely to survive - and that, so far, with a little bit of nudging, is what they are doing!

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30 DAYS WILD : 24 - I WENT WALKING AND I SAW . . .

This is where I went for a walk today.

It's hard, currently, not to be overwhelmed by heat. Today is sunny and clear. Before that the weather was heavy and oppressive. And before that the sky was dull and overcast. A letter arrived from the hospital with a list of nine series of vaccinations I will need to replace my immunities but my new GP practice seems to have shut up shop. I don't understand! There was a leaflet with the letter. I mustn't forget there's still time for me to get Graft Versus Host Disease and because of the transplant I am more at risk from a selection of cancers so I must use high factor suncream, wear sunglasses, get out of breath for thirty minutes a day to keep myself fit (this can be in ten minute chunks) and have ten minutes a day with my skin exposed to sunshine (for the sake of vitamin D).

Butterfly being observed by a fly. June 24th 2020

So when I go for a walk I feel like the invisible man - my woolly hat has been replaced with a flowery sunhat and I wear large dark glasses in between it and my flowery mask. The sunglasses change how I see the world. They enrich all colours. Butterflies, pretty at the best of times, become absolute stunners. The sky is bluer. Clouds more dramatic. Leaves greener. The earth is enriched and warm. Photos don't look the same when I get them home! This butterfly was bright orange when I saw it through my glasses!

It's National Insect Week. I spent an age before I set out, trying to photograph bees on local poppies. Bees never stop moving and when they ping off the poppy and on to the next one, its petals are left vibrating. It's easier to photograph bees on sturdy bramble flowers I have discovered. However fiercely the bee wriggles, the flower stays still. (I've used one of the blurry poppy photos for a temporary header in honour of National Insect Week.)

Today's walk was in the country, through some woods between the moors and a stream. There was bracken and there were ferns, This, I think, is bracken. Who knows the difference between bracken and ferns?

Wasp pollinating a wild rose. June 24th 2020

There were wild roses and brambles. 

Here, a rose is being pollinated by a wasp.

Moss in woods on dry stone wall. June 24th 2020

And in the woods, perhaps my favourite observation today, this little moss on an old dry stone wall.

30 DAYS WILD

Today's Random Act of

Wildness is to

go for a walk.

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Linked to 'Our World Tuesday'
And 'My Corner of the World'

STREET PLANTS AT THE END OF MARCH FOR THE BEGINNING OF APRIL

This is a picture post. There's not much to read. If I had lots to say, I'd say it. But today, I don't. I'll let the plants speak for themselves. Or, rather, not speak for themselves for they are pretty quiet at present; battered by frost and snow, constantly being deceived into thinking it's spring when it isn't.

The exception is this groundsel which seems pretty chipper. I've never described anything as 'chipper' before but the word seems to fit. The angle shields it both from north and east winds and for the moment it's not garlanded with litter.

For the most part though, I look higher up walls to find plants. I've never lived anywhere with so many stone walls before. All seem to be built in the same way; two walls built parallel to each other and the gap between them filled with smaller stones. On top of these is a layer of long stones laid horizontally, with a row of quite hefty, sideways stones on top. The work which must have gone into these walls must have been phenomenal. The tonnage, mind boggling. And because of the topography here, some are waist or shoulder high on one side but way, way higher on the other.

Here are dandelion seedlings beginning to look out newly on the world.

And foxgloves which have overwintered are beginning to green.

This is common but I can't name it.

A dilapidated ivy leaved toadflax would you say?

And the always-interesting shape of an unfurled willow-herb seed pod.

All these plants were photographed on 30th March, ready for the first of the month posting. Daft. So I'm moving the street plant posts to 20th of each month. I'll put a link box then too - and afterwards always on the 20th.

In the meantime, if you have a street plant post that you'd like us to know about, do put its URL in the box below.

(The site which provides the link box seems to have gone down . . . and the link box has vanished along with it. By the time I next look, hopefully it will have reappeared. In the meantime . . . . if you have a Street Plant Post to share - leave its URL in with the comments.)

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WALL - A STREET PLANT POST

I've decided, for the moment, to keep comparing. Contrasts are interesting. They matter.

The dark walls of Halifax and the surrounding fields bothered me when we arrived. Gloomy. I wasn't sure whether this blackness is intrinsic to the stones the walls are made from or whether it's soot. London used to be black. Westminster Abbey used to be black. Look at it now!

And I can't answer this yet. (Don't worry. I'll find out. Plenty of time.)

I'm getting used to them. What's more, they are a good place to find street plants. So it's another new experience - to look sideways and up, not just down by my feet.

The picture above . . . I think I'll have come back to this exact spot when I do my next 'stuck foot' post. I'll take photographs just of the plants in this immediate scene. So many crammed in together.

Here's a confluence of themes. I'm getting used to a green instead of white light when it rains and finding it's interesting to notice familiar plants in a new context. Groundsel; but camouflaged. The plant and the green on the wall in the rainy late-afternoon light of a January day are in harmony. A unity. An invisibility. It's a surprise. A new experience. When it rains, black walls turn green!

I don't know what this plant is. Can you tell me?

What about this one?

This fern below?

Does it strike you that the stones look like petrified wood?

Why is this ivy red? Can anyone explain?

And below - a foxglove!

Until I came here, I'd not thought of foxgloves as urban wild plants. Very country hedgerow I'd have said. That was . . . until the first post on this blog when I found them growing on top of another wall.

On moving from Dorset to West Yorkshire I started again with 'Loose and Leafy in Halifax'. Maybe I made a mistake. Perhaps I should have created a blog dedicated solely to this wall!

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OUR WORLD TUESDAY

If you'd like to join me in noticing and admiring plants growing wild in towns and cities . . . I'll be putting a link box for Street Plant Posts on Loose and Leafy, 1st - 7th February.