These photos are from the tow path at between Iffley and Oxford, but I checked on the way home, with my neighbour whose front garden I am far too embarassed to photograph, even though I'm fairly sure they haven't even moved in yet, and sure enough their front garden is teeming with coltsfoot, too.
I'm not quite sure why my neighbours have a front garden full of coltsfoot. Up until the new owners moved in, there was an unnerving stand of bamboo massing in their front garden, but still, every spring, in the gravelled front, a frantic fringe of coltsfoot would appear under the sprawl of bamboo.
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the street as the new neighbours, in their first week, ripped out every shred of bamboo from the front garden. No more cables of bamboos heading pell-mell for the narrow ancient sewers, no more shoots testing the solidity of our thin concrete foundations. And the coltsfoot came up in legion quantities, yellow as the sun.
First flowering of the Coltsfoot is a Nature's Calendar event. It's a marker of spring, a moment more definite than the daisy or the dandelion, which might spring up during a warm spell, earlier than the celandine, wilder than the snowdrop.
This patch on the tow-path is wonderfully reliable, and spring is here, maybe a little early, but all the more welcome for it.
I'm not quite sure why my neighbours have a front garden full of coltsfoot. Up until the new owners moved in, there was an unnerving stand of bamboo massing in their front garden, but still, every spring, in the gravelled front, a frantic fringe of coltsfoot would appear under the sprawl of bamboo.
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the street as the new neighbours, in their first week, ripped out every shred of bamboo from the front garden. No more cables of bamboos heading pell-mell for the narrow ancient sewers, no more shoots testing the solidity of our thin concrete foundations. And the coltsfoot came up in legion quantities, yellow as the sun.
First flowering of the Coltsfoot is a Nature's Calendar event. It's a marker of spring, a moment more definite than the daisy or the dandelion, which might spring up during a warm spell, earlier than the celandine, wilder than the snowdrop.
This patch on the tow-path is wonderfully reliable, and spring is here, maybe a little early, but all the more welcome for it.
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