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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ASH TREE: A STUCK FOOT POST

Yesterday morning a man I don't know called out a greeting. "Well done!" he shouted. I stopped.

???

"You're doing well!" he bellowed, long-distantly.

???

"Thank you!" I yelled back, puzzled.

"How old are you?"

At top voice, I told him.

This is the first time anyone has asked me how old I am since . . .

. . . well when is it that people stop asking how old you are? Fourteen? Something like that; a few years after you've stopped being precise about the months and days you've accumulated. "Five and three-quarters," you say . . . and find a way to slip in (hopefully and acquisitively yet also with pride) the date of your next birthday. Then there's a long gap before you start re-volunteering age related information . . . you are soon to be one-hundred-and-ninety-three and you remember when Noah got married.

Have I really reached an age when people shout out 'well dones' in the street simply because I am walking along with moderate speed? Not really. I resisted shouting 'I'm not as old as you think! I've been ill but I'm getting better!'

Twice, while I was being treated for leukaemia, people mistook someone older than me for my offspring. I thought I'd got beyond that. Clearly not. My hair has re-grown; white and thick, with an irritatingly purposeful wave that makes me look prim. When I was young (in my early twenties) a friend commented, "We think we aren't vain. We think we don't mind what we wear. But no way would we buy crimplene!" I feel that about my hair. I've never minded excessively about my appearance but I don't like it that my post-cancer-treatment-hair currently makes me look like a lesser version of the Queen.

How is any of this relevant? Well, this morning I was thinking perhaps I didn't feel like going for a walk. Then I decided that before I age irreparably, by which I mean the kind of aging where you really are running out of years, I'd better not give up on going out walking in the early morning. So off I went. And I got  as far as round the corner when I was stopped in my tracks by a bunch of yellow flowers growing at the foot of an ash tree. The sun was catching it 'just right' and I couldn't pass by. I've still not caught up with June posts - and there are Tree Following photos in my camera . . . but the moment seemed right for a 'Stuck Foot Post'. Clearly, I thought, if I am looking old enough to be congratulated for hurrying, there's no time to hang around waiting to fill in odd gaps.

A 'Stuck Foot Post' is where you stand still and see what you can see. You can twist and turn and twizzle and you can move one foot but not the other. You can lean forward if you wish but you mustn't walk forward. One foot must remain 'stuck in place'.

Until very recently, this road had many trees in it. First a couple were taken away because they were growing out of a wall and were pulling it over. Then a cluster of cherry trees and others were chopped down because (a local account tells) burglars hid their van behind them while engaged on raiding a series of large industrial units and the owners decided to open the view. But this ash remains. I walk past it a lot but hadn't paid it a great deal of attention till it gained the status of 'one of those remaining'.

During May and June, there was a campaign to persuade people not to mow their lawns so small plants could flower in them to look pretty and come to the aid of struggling pollinators and quite a lot of grass around the place has grown longer than usual in consequence. Then there's the coronovirus which has taken people out of the work force so councils are not necessarily prioritising having short grass. Locally, this has led to lots of flowering plants in the streets and where the council has eventually started mowing it has sensitively left swathes of it long where poppies grow and some buttercups are still flowering, and clover. So although the broader scene of grass has now been cut, immediately round this tree there are nettles and dock and clover and ragwort (is it ragwort or something else?) and . . .  

So I stopped, and looked, and took photographs, then set about running along (scurrying) in bursts to catch up with the morning and my fitness and my age . . . before, all of a sudden I inadvertently run out of years.

If you feel like posting a 'Stuck Foot Post', let me know the link and I'll add it here.

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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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THE ALLOTMENT

The adventure begins. The first cleared bed.

One of the adjustments I've had to make in my move to Halifax is to try to consider some wild plants foes instead of friends.

We could have chosen a part-allotment with the soil already tilled, useful plants already growing on it, a green-house and a shed. Or we could have chosen a wacking-great almost-field, full of grasses and willowherb, sorrel, ragwort - and a whole (erstwhile) raised bed solely packed with rib-wort (narrow-leaved plantain).

I've clipped back the bramble
but haven't yet had the heart to destroy this willow herb.

Traditional, gardening-book wisdom says go for the green-house and weed-free soil. Our hearts said to go for the field. And being a true believer in hearts - it's the wild field we have.

What I'd have liked best would have been to leave it as we found it. It was beautiful. So for several days I went and stood there half an hour at a time and did nothing but look at it. Drinking it in. Saying 'good-bye' - in the sense that allotments are for carrots, not wild grasses.

Eventually, my friend Esther insisted that one of the important things about allotments is not to annoy our neighbours so the flowering grasses really had to stop being admired and be chopped down instead.

At that point, I was still feeling disoriented. And just as one may be unable to eat when anxious or displaced, I couldn't take photos. So there are no 'befores' and 'afters'.

I would have liked to have photographed the grasses. I knew I would be sad not to have recorded them. But there we are. I wish I'd photographed the soil where they fell - so you could see their masses and masses of seeds. Ditto the sorrel - thousands of seeds turning the soil slightly rusty. Ragwort stems are too stout for garden sheers so they were reprieved for a few days, then we went back with secateurs.

Ragwort is one of the most beautiful plants ever, yet it has to go!

It's a wonderful site. The gardeners there are clearly accomplished. There will be a lot to live up to. Fruit bushes drip with raspberries and blackcurrants. There are rows and rows of strawberry plants. But there are flowers too. Some people are even making a feature of the grasses. And there are lots of sheds and greenhouses. And nearly everyone who has a greenhouse or shed has a 'backgarden' behind it - an area hidden off from the rest of the world, where they can simply sit and 'be' which is a wonderful resource in a densely populated area.

I've never seen an allotment site like this one. There's an office and a store and a water pipe which loops up and down the plots and a loo - and really importantly - we are not expected to achieve perfection in a year.

And no way will we.

In the first post on this blog I said I wanted blackberries. And now we have them - growing on a bank on the other side of the boundary wall. And reachable. I've had to clip them back and we'll need to lean over for the fruit when it's ripe but there's no bramble patch to clear. Hurray!

There's no bind weed either. No nettles. The soil is black and fine. The grasses can be dug out without too much trouble.

Brightly coloured, industrial bread baskets litter the plot. Don't know why!

None the less, it took about three hours to prepare the first bed. A second one is part-way there. Once that's plant-free we will sow four vegetable crops. The current idea is for onions, kohlrabi, spring greens and chard. If anyone thinks this is a bad choice, please say soon because the first sowing will be in the next few days.

A previous allotmenteer created slightly-raised beds over about a third of the plot so that's where we are making a start, digging out wild-plants on alternate beds and chucking them onto the other alternating beds so the cut down grasses and the plants we'd prefer not to be growing there will begin to suffocate, making it easier to dig them out and be replaced with green manure later. (Gardening is disgustingly destructive.) There is no overall plan yet but this seems a good way to start. There are loads of objects to clear - masses of industrial bread baskets and other 'containers' and 'troughs' so each 'session' is divided in un-equal parts between gathering rubbish, cutting down grasses and, sadly, pulling out wild plants so we can grow food instead.

When it's cool and quiet and slightly drizzly, it's a lovely place to work. Sad and exciting. Can't have all joy. I saw a toad. Three days later I saw it dead.

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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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