stopped by the flowers

Turn your back for a moment at this time of year and this happens:

This one stopped me in my commute. I stood in the road to take it. No-one ran me over. It's spring in full flow and everything is invincible.

Stopped at the lights on the bypass, the verges were awash with wildflowers. Ox-eye Daisies dominate but the scatters of Stitchwort and sparkles of buttercups mingle in. I saw Orchids on the ring road verges this spring; Early Purples, while I was stopped in a traffic queue.

Yesterday I was going "really!?" at Google maps as it lead me along an unmetalled road and a couple of industrial lots into the back entrance of  Banbury Station (there were a couple of signs too, but it was definitely a shortcut that required three minutes of faith). Then this, growing on an abandoned parking attendant's sentrybox stopped me dead.  This smear of alert yellow against the battered blue box (and we have lots of these leggy yellow wildflowers so I don't know which it is) had shot up from the tiniest smear of carpark dirt, in the frantic spring incubator.

slugs are eating my pansies

Outtakes from the last time I was out photographing flowers. These are randomers from a tray of bedding I bought last year sometime - still flowering until they're done, as pansies do. I did not notice the slug when I was taking the photograph, strangely. Slugs like pansy petals. I remember one year I had lovely black pansies and overnight a little slug swarm ate every last petal. The smears I left behind after I found that were black with petals. I can eat the pansies too, but the food value isn't high, either in terms of nutrition or flavour. They turn up, sprinkled over food at one of our sweeter local eateries. Not sure I fancy these though.

the cost of the frost

This year's abrupt temperature down-swipes were so mercifully brief I though the garden had got away with it. It was only later, when some plants failed to start (or continue) growing that the non-obvious chill catchers emerged.

This looks OK, doesn't it? But every week, there's a bit more brown and a bit less green and that's the wrong way round for this time of year.



It's not the only one. Crimson Bonfire Peach and OMG Nectarine!!! are in a parlous state. The Poppy Flowered Abutilon is still resolutely bare-twigged. The Crimson China Witchhazel has yet to show any signs of new growth.

But the plant's not over till the season's gone.



This isn't my tree, but it is instructive. The soft end-growth is being dumped off - dead in the frost. Not coming back. But the leaves, smaller but still there, are growing from older growth with safer cell walls.

All plants are in constant competition - with themselves as well as each other. They won't hesitate to strike off the weak, the damaged, the diseased, and pull back to the strong and sturdy.

The only question is - is there enough left to grow from?

in praise of grape hyacinths

A couple of years ago, at a garden show, I found a company specialising in Grape Hyacinths. Normally considered to be something of a pest, Grape Hyacinths are most often seen in the front garden they have completely taken over, invading from a neighbour's who will swear blind they have no such thing, determinedly taking over some terrace or corner, sweeping your carefully planned and diverse spring planting ahead of it, or weirdly and spontaneously in a plant pot or border where it wasn't planted. It is (one of the) great invasive bulbs.

The lady who grew them in many fancy varieties had other opinions. "This one is delicate," she said, "This one won't spread! This one smells like peppermint thins!" Suitably intrigued, I filled a paper bag with bulbs. The results have been diverse, and haven't spread -- although my garden in an intense inter-plant competition area, so possibly they would in a more open environment.



 


The sky blues and the almost whites are delicate, pretty things with - indeed - a pepperminty scent. The black/purple varieties have a weirdly anatomical air - one for the gruesome garden. I also have a deeply-cut and slashed double variety, which hardly looks like a grape hyacinth at all; but my camera refused to focus on it, possibly confused by the smashed-looking petals.

Their broad tolerance of conditions and cheery commitment to flowering no matter what cheers me massively, and it's great that I've managed to get grape hyacinths into my garden. Interesting varieties - whoah, a yellow muscari !? a tassel-head species, which is also edible! - make the whole thing even more fun.

Tulips, dead and alive

I didn't plant fresh tulips last winter, but a scattering of the previous years came through; the lily-flowered reds were smaller than in previous years, but still looked good. A few of Big Sunny came back. What an amazing tulip.





The dead tulips are weeks old now, from when I bought myself flowers. Orange tulips grown under Dutch glass, bought from the co-op on the corner for a few quid. It's a great compliment to say of a garden plant that it dies well, or dies tidily. Tulips do better than that. They die fabulously.

three things in april

The wheat in the wall

A feeder walks down Leopold Street. Just outside the nunnery, under the cherry trees, scoops of wheat litter the pavement. Some go to birds, some doubtless to rats; in this wet city they are never far away. The nunnery wall has a kind of concrete skirting, detached in places from the main body of the wall. In it the wheat is sprouting, sweet wheatgrass waiting for a grazer, where odd seeds have tumbled into damp, fertile spaces.

A traditional green roof

On Donnington Bridge, this service building sits at one of the entrances to the residential moorings. A defiant slab of concrete and corrugate, it was built with no thought of aesthetic appeal. Still, the shallow pitch, the shadowing trees and the omnipresent moisture from the river and weir have brought it into the mossy wonderland aesthetic beloved of certain parts of the internet. This is green roofing traditional style; a look we would love to pursue... were it not for the constant water seepage issue.

The flower of patience

My cane orchid has finally reflowered, some years after it was carefully selected from a portable cut-price unit in Sainsburys prominently marked "Manager's Special" as having the Best Flower. That year, there were cane orchids about in large quantities for the the first time; presumably some wrinkle in their cultivation had just been ironed out. These were allsorts, probably bywaste from aiming for white or accepted varieties. I tried to ID it from a fancy cane orchid website, but I think it's just an endearing mutt. Manager's Special (I stuck with the name) has come to flower again; hooray for the bathroom orchids.

leaving behind the ivy traces

On my way to get a haircut I saw this on the side of the multi-storey car park:

A creeper (probably ivy) has been peeled off the cream-painted shuttered concrete wall, leaving behind its imprint in a tracery of paint damage. Here it looks a little drunken and random, but let me give it the mid-century modern treatment:




There's a pattern you could wear, on a smart Zara blouse, ideal for work to evening; or make into fancy wallpaper to dress up a shabby chic restaurant project in a dilapidated shop unit.

My assumption is that I caught the time-space between the gardeners pulling the weeds and the painters repairing the damage, although it's possible that this will be left; this modernist multi-storey is marked for destruction, to be replaced by high-density flats. Here's what they look like; a sort of 80s take on modernism, with bold stripes of red and blue on the rails.



The top two decks are permanently closed now, but before that happened I did go up there once to look at the view. It's spectacular; Oxford laid out like a fancy, shiny quilt with tiered red-brick skirts around a golden hub, glittering rivers pulling lines of green through the houses.

Part of the plans for the future include community garden space, so the multistorey ends up as flats with a garden well, quad style, with spectacular views and shared green space.

the bumblebee and strimmer

The allotment has bees. I didn't mention that, did I? At the far end, in a clearing in the middle of some brambles, are four beehives. The bees belong to the Treasurer. Today I met a few more people -- the Local Couple, who spotted me and came to check me out; the Romanian, whose plot is very developed (fruit trees, a grape vine, a spectacular tomato house) and of course the Keeper of the Power Tools, which gave me access to the strimmer.

I strimmed my paths and marked my borders. In the top corner, I kept getting warning buzzes. Sharp little hiss-like hums. I took my strimmer back a few steps and looked down into the heavy tussocks. There were runs down there; rat-runs, probably. And also a surpising number of bees. Solitary bees. And bumble bees.

As long as you don't hit the nest with the strimmer, a strimmer in your hand is probably the best way to discover a bumblebee nest. I gave the bee-busy area a broad berth and declared it fallow for the season. I'll need to give it a sign, probably, but I'd forgotten my writing tools. Rookie error.

Also my hat, but I was wearing UV sheild product on a bit of a bouff and my hair kept the sun off nicely.  

The strimmer's string ran out just as I was running out of steam. I killed the engine and checked it back into the shed, apologising aloud to anyone's afternoon I had been annoyingly buzzing at. The bees, certainly. Overhead a Red Kite craned down, checking me out. A crow flew by and dipped a piece of bread in one of the plumbed-in troughs, like a fable.

I lifted the weed supressor and shifted it to the next space. There was still a bit of couch grass under and I yanked out some. You never get it all. I found some chitting potatoes in the plant-pass-on zone and some beans in a dried pod on the weed suppressor. Some leftover broadbeans went in. I put down thick drills of parsnip, beetroot, radish, spinach. Easy peasy pop-up plants. Inbetween I put down wildflower, pot marigold, phacelia, drunken cottage style.

Lot of paving stones on the site. I shifted them uphill, laying them like Minecraft tiles over some more couch-grass. Ants mourned their losses. Carnivorous flies and little wasps hovered over the fresh-turned soil. A starling with a song like a car alarm sat on the fence, licking its chops. I found a fat, juicy leatherjacket, but nothing was sure enough of me yet to come down for it.

I'll bring them some treats next time. 

so yes, the allotment

It was a cold day. The allotment site is up the hill and catches the wind and under the grey sky it felt weirdly open. Compared to my little green box of a garden, this felt like an open plane, even though it's just a little space surrounded by houses in the estate.

Don't worry! Said the allotment treasurer, who'd been the one pushing the allotments on our network. There's allotments enough for everyone! Allotment 1, closest to the gate, wrapped around the communal shed (home of the strimmer and mower) and backed onto an ivy and douglas hedge. Allotments 2-3 backed onto the houses, surrounded by very tidy plots full of regimented onions and broad beans, looking a little weedy in this rather rough spring. Allotment 4 was a tangled mess of couch grass, paving stones and rubbish sweeping uphill to an unhedged backgarden bordered with brambles. Allotment 5, the furthest from the gate, was a mess of bleak, broken soil, slightly waterlogged, as if someone had put down some weed control so severe it had also taken out everything else. Except the Horse Tail, which was doing fine, sprouting everywhere. I pulled a stem and waved it at the treasurer. Is this a big problem on the allotments, I said? There's a bit of clump here, she said, and it's possible it will spread out and destroy the whole area. But for now, it's... mostly contained.

I was quite taken by the one by the gate -- it had that on point, riding shotgun sort of feel, and wasn't intimidatingly large. But one of the others leapt on that instantly, a weekend man seeking  more space. The East Oxford Cyclist went for one of the little plots in among the tidy spaces. She'd just lost another allotment to horsetail -- it's a major weed on the whole estate. That and sucker ash.

Do you mind if I go back and look at 4? I asked. You go ahead, she said. I've got the paperwork for when you're ready. I peeled back a bit of some of the rubbish on Plot 4. It was some sort of waxed tarp, the cover off a landrover maybe, something like that, laid down to supress weeds. I'd brought a small fork with me, and broke the soil, and rubbed it between my hands.

The couch grass is fierce here, but there's no Horse Tail. Yet! We'll see if it comes in once I start clearing beds. There's a lot of rubbish - paving slabs, bricks. There's a sort of compost thing, full of crap, dry compost, mostly couch grass with a few dessicated pumpkins. Plenty of things are growing in there already, among the grass and weeds. The poly-tunnel is the neighbour on one side, the heap visible on the right is the neighbour in the other direction. The camera has flattened the slope a bit, but it's gentle, and warm. A sun-catcher.

At the Co-op on the corner I sketched a plan, while some local characters wrangled blattedly behind me, a cheery memorial of the pub it had been before. Doubtless that'll change, as time goes by.