a door in the verge

Too weird for a fly-tip, too random for art.



Probably awaiting a van turning up later.

the allotment in the hottest summer

Not a lot happened this summer on the allotment. My time went on watering the back garden, increasingly desperate to minimise the droughtloss, which was of course destroying my apples (bitter pit) and tomatoes (blossom end rot) but also stressing the hell out of everything.

Well not everything of course - bindweed was fine. But so, curiously, was my Bush Clematis, now smothering the rest of the Jungle bed. The grape vine had a great year, but the Passion Flower had fewer flowers than usual; I only got a handful of gooseberries and raspberries, but the currants did well. The blueberries died; I couldn't water them enough.

Up at the allotment, the sun is insane. The soil is hard and powdery. Every bed I clear is teeming with ants. Then the car breaks and then I break, in the heat.




The weather cooled again finally but I still didn't make it up to the the allotment. Although I'm pleased about the Phacelia. Something for the bees.

I probably need to start the seed at home. Not enough is getting through the seedling stage.

the garden on the air conditioning unit

This summer, any source of moisture has been valuable. Consider this building - a particular favourite of mine because of its fantastical boatish curvy lines:



There's something fuzzing away greenishly on top of that white box, which is not a window box, is it now? No, it's something else that's generating water, not much but enough for a few hardy plants to cling on. The steady thrum is a giveaway; it's an air conditioning unit, exhaling warm damp air from the interior, which is some sort of school thing attended by overseas students, doubtless in overstuffed and stuffy classrooms.



The hanging basket hook hints at a past with more money to spend on the building; this building was once dressed and groomed. That was then, though, and this is now, and something has slid softly off the end of a maintenance contract and started reverting to semi-native scrubland.



I say semi-native because that sapling is that doyenne of urban treescapes, a Lime, rather than the Hawthorn, Birch, Hazel or Bog Myrtle you'd expect on rough ground. We have a reasonable number of Limes in the area, but none very close, so that seed did some travelling. The other plants looks like variations on willowherb, the grow-anywhere ruffian of empty (and full) spaces. And there's a Willow of course, as we're in the zone where the fluff blows up from the river.


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All of these are plants of concern on a building. That little tree, in particular, has found something exciting and rewarding to plunge its roots into.

Still, there are worse things that can grow in air conditioning units.

the roses on standing way

Drifting through Milton Keynes, the Midlands motorist naturally hits the happy groove of Standing Way, a tree-screened dual carriageway strung with friendly roundabouts, each one with a pleasingly prosaic name. In high summer, as you work your way from Bottle Dump to Coffee Hill, the screening greenery is thick with vigorous municipal roses, pink and white open blossoms, ramblers and rugosas nodding in the lorry gusts and car wakes.




The delicious efficiency of the road means every glimpse is snatched; good luck finding a traffic jam here, even at the busiest times. Here and there the wide verges are studded with functional road furniture; signs, lights, bus stops, crash barriers.




Behind them, the roses scramble up over low municipal trees selected for longevity and manageability, screening the utility buildings and warehouses, homes and schools from the swish swish swish of the cars going by.

on Gloucester Street, near where the tree came down

Oh, what's that on the creeper, some sort of red vine ties?



It looks like electrical tape?



Red and white electrical tape?



That's something I've not seen before.



Maybe it got yanked down by a drunk and had to be reattached.

no joy in its flowering

What a year we have had, so abruptly and brutally cold in late spring, and then so dry, for weeks on end. I'm not the only person to have suddenly and unexpectedly lost a magnificent feature plant:



The palm outside the University offices has flowered spectacularly. The blooms have a sweet, dark smell. I don't think the plant has survived the experience.

So many plants have flowered spectacularly this year; trees smothered with flowers and dropping branches, new growth anxiously shedding its leaves under the overbright sun.

It's no comfort to find that it's not just my poor Tree Fern that's in terminal decline.

ETA Tim got sick of me sulking and took me to a garden centre to buy fancy morcilla another Tree Fern. They were a bit shit though, so I just got a discount replacement fern off an internet garden shop. 

learning to love my bindweed

It's drastically hot and desperately dry. I'm too scared to go up to the allotment. I dare not weed. Any soil exposed will desiccate and dry away. And so, the bindweed cometh.



That's a pretty scabious, isn't it? It's Black Cat. I grew it from seed. The bees love it. But look at what's growing over it, in lumpy, messy garlands. It's our native Morning Glory, Hedge Bindweed.



Ironically, as bindweed runs riot across my back garden, out front my Morning Glory is having a terrible year. It can't get enough water up, and the leaves and small and scattered with stress spots. Usually floribundant and fantastically prolific, this year the vine is struggling to cover the shed, and I've had maybe, three flowers - in a pale and sickly lilac.



So, every time a white trumpet flashes from my bindweed, or I see a scamper of heart-shaped flowers romp across a flower-bed, my heart leaps a little and I hesitate, for just one more flower. At least it's growing, not turning toes and dying in the heat. Although even its not flowering very much. Nothing is, not even the fuchsias and pelargoniums.



This is insanity, of course. What I need to do is hoe it off and section it out (never yank it - the bindweed will be fine and whatever its twined will uproot). and I do, I do - for five minutes, and then I need to get out of the sun, the heat, and tomorrow the tiny section of garden I've cleared will be merrily re-invaded in a vast heat-pumped caricature of the usual Sisyphean summer weeding dance.

Still, the flowers are pretty.

it's another interstitial garden

The new under-over bridge corridor linking the two halves of the Royal Academy has revealed something I never saw before, just a glimpse from high windows. Hello, courtyard garden, porous paving, interstitial greenspace:



Is it staff only? or another bit of the RA that's accessible to the member's only spaces squirrelled away behind haughty volunteer attendants and Tracey Emin neons?

A closer look at that grass/block arrangement



This, famously, is not supposed to be possible. With the inexorability of entropy, the grass roots multiply, disarranging the blocks, which rock, lift, lose their regularity, crack and pop. What are they doing? Is there a secret matrix made of something flexible and non-decaying, like an architectural plastic? Or it it just quite new?

Here, take another look at the bizarre tree canopy at the far end:



The trees - mutable and forgiving London Planes, by the looks of it - have had their three dimensionality stripped from them, constrained and restrained into brushstroke vertical trunks and a soft pastel-scribble of flattened canopy, barely a foot deep, practically a green ceiling. Two chairs look out across this remarkable and possibly evanescent space.

It's difficult to do this with trees long term.



From the looks of it, it's a work in progress. Maybe we'll see it opened to the public?

Or maybe, just as gardens sometimes have an artist in residence, the bulk of their work never visible or shown, perhaps this space belongs to a gardener in residence. If so, they're not going to care about how that blocked lawn will be maintained or whether the trees will start to roll and splay like drunken party guests, as the curious formality of this interstitial courtyard garden will be swept away by the urgent vision of the next art gardener.

There's nothing on their website about this space now (I found this on the plans, but there may have been drift) so it's just a tiny slice for now; until the next time I pass that high window.