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.
.
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.
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.
.
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.
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