30 DAYS WILD : 19 - MAKING CHOICES

Every so often, the Wildlife Trusts sends emails to those registered for 30 Days Wild with suggestions of what they might be doing for their 'random acts of wildness'. One of them recently is to go litter picking. Gathering litter is a bit of a challenge. Not only am I currently extra-wary of germs there's always the problem of what to do with the product of one's 'gatherings'. Most weeks the council collects things to be re-cycled (paper, plastic bottles, cans) and food-waste; but 'residual waste' (i.e. more or less everything else) is taken once a fortnight - and sometimes there's a delay with that. Even a short excursion to pick up crisp packets, stray plastic bags and fish and chip cartons can land one with more 'stuff' than will fit even in a big black wheelie bin when combined with one's own accumulated bits and bobs of packaging etc.. And if it doesn't fit in the wheelie bin, it won't be taken away.

I do put things in my bin if they land up outside my house, whether they have been dropped there by passers by or blown there from further along the terrace. But street responsibilities don't stop there. What about the plants which grow in the gutter or up through the pavement? For all that I enthuse about wild plants in the street, I remove these too. Plastic bottles and cans come bobbing along when it rains, form log-jams against any plants they come across and water pools across the road. It gets in the way. If there were any traffic, pedestrians would get splashed. I've been splashed. I didn't like it. Plants which come up through the pavement tip the slabs into an angle and people trip. Plants which push their way through tarmac cause cracks and the pathway disintegrates. So I pull them up too. When I'm doing this 'street tidying' I don't feel in the least bit 'wild', I feel fuddy-duddy and mean. I can even sense some of you looking over my shoulder, being critical, saying 'I thought your blog celebrates street plants?'. Well it does. But even they have to be in the 'right' place. 'Nature' is pretty strong. We humans can be overwhelmed. We aren't always as indomitable as we think. Let buddleia take root in the tiles of our roofs and our houses will fall down.

Quite a lot of us have become interested in the way the coronavirus pandemic has led to an increase in plant-life. Verges have been left un-mown. More plants than usual have been left unmolested in urban settings. Which means ordinary citizens are having to decide 'what is to be done'; what is to be removed and what should stay. It's not just me.

And so it was, that when I was photographing a wall full of ferns (Maidenhair spleenwort do you think?) with flowering yellow poppies at its feet, a voice came shouting across the road,

"THEY ARE POPPIES'. 

I knew. I turned to see who was telling me. A woman who lives in that street explained from a healthy 'social distance' that she had pulled out other plants along the foot of the wall but had left the poppies on purpose. I really like this. It mean these poppies are not here by chance but by choice. Someone had chosen to leave them - and that is as much a choice as it would have been to have put them there in the first place.

I have a neighbour who lets ragwort grow in a pot outside her front door each year. I do love this neighbourhood! And ragwort is currently almost everywhere. Dandelions have stopped flowering but we still have lots of yellow flowers. A spontaneous 'Britain in Bloom'.

I've even come across a teasel. This is my biggest surprise. Not only has it been allowed to grow taller than me, it seems to be the only one. How did it get to be there? It has three seed heads. Maybe there will be more teasels next year. 

30 DAYS WILD

Today's Random Act of

Wildness is to

pick up litter and

choose which flowers

can stay in the street.

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ONE WALL

It was a mistake.
I'd thought photographing familiar plants would be a good idea; a clear connection between my old life and new. But it wasn't. Seeing good old convolvulus poking through railings instead of clambering over a blackberry hedge was painful. And ragwort should be beside tracks. Those tracks might be of the narrow, foot-trodden into earth kind, or they might be railway ones . . . but that's where I expect them to be. Seeing them spread about on top of a high, black wall was disconcerting - a clash of feelings. I came back to my new home tearful and full of home-sickness.

I doubt if many people move in this direction - from the sea and sand and sunshine and fossils of Dorset to the no-sea, no-sand, not-even-a-river, less sunshine, more rain of Halifax. Explaining is difficult. To say too much perfection is eventually boring might not sound very sensible. But where I used to find it reassuring to see the same plants coming up in the same place every year, I'd begun to think 'Year in, year out, that same old plant. How predictable can you get?'

Of course, a wall might seem even more predictable; being there 'year in, year out' is precisely what one expects it to be. But for me - each wall here is new. Another new thing to explore. And the less like a Dorset wall it is, the better I can cope. Abrupt change is easier than struggling with memories.

As I write this, I'm hearing what I think is Kurdish music coming in from the house next door instead of silence. And people passing by in the street are more likely to be talking Urdu with a Yorkshire accent than English. At night, in my old house, it was so quiet I could hear the street lights humming. Incessantly they hummed. And I was becoming more and more frightened by the sea - the millions and millions of tons of pebbles which make Chesil beach crashing against each other, over and over and over with each white wave. There needs to be a new word for 'hearing'. To 'hear' the roar of Chesil Beach is nothing like hearing the roar of traffic on a busy road. In order to be run down by a car you have to step in front of it. No way is it out to get you. Whereas the sea . . . it's eating into the underbelly of the cliffs till there's no rock left to hold up the tops so they crumble away or come crashing down until in some places there's nothing but grass sticking out high above the coast; and whole sections of cliffs are cracked sheer from top to bottom by alternating rain and drought - and the sea is sucking everything that falls into it greedily away.

In an era of Brexit, it's best to be clear about this from the beginning. Where I've lived until now, it would rarely come into anyone's head to mention anyone's ethnic background. For nearly everyone shares a similar heritage. Now, all of a sudden I'm being confronted with the oddness of citizens with different cultures living in different 'areas' all within the same small town . . . and of shops being defined by the ancestry of their owners - this is a Pakistani shop, this is a Polish shop, this is a 'European' shop. I think I'm classed as a 'European'. I've always thought of myself as English. And one might as well say it aloud - that to be defined as 'Eastern European' (as opposed to just 'European') round here tends to mean you are expected to be rowdy, loud, litter strewing and drunk. (I've yet to find out what the stereotype of someone like me is - so I don't yet know whether I will live up to it, or down to it - or what!)

Thatched cottages are common in Dorset. Hardly any buildings are abandoned or broken. Abandoned and broken is new to me - and here 'abandoned and broken' is everywhere. The buildings which have fallen out of use are too large and too many to be turned into holiday homes for wealthy people who like to look at a bit of greenery and a few cows at the weekends.

You'd have thought that once into the the countryside I'd feel more 'at home'. But the leaves on the trees here have more blue in them. Their green heads towards emerald. And the whole landscape is over-coloured and so highly saturated it's disconcerting. It's alien. It's an adventure.

So . . . I hope you will adventure with me in this new land . . .

as I get used to convolulus growing thinly on black, urban walls.

A change is sometimes way more than a rest - it's a regeneration of life. Already, brushing away the tears, I can feel that new energy begin.

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