in the wet woodlands, the skeleton flower

I suspect my Blue Himalayan Poppy may be finally going the way of all things that can't out-compete dandelions this year, so I was looking for a suitable weird replacement and came across tales of the Skeleton Flower, aka Diphylleia Grayii an enchanting woodland species (hooray, perfect for my deep shade) that reputedly turns glass-transparent when it rains. Taking this with a bit pinch of internet salt, I went looking for some actual footage rather than the ubiquitous gussied-up insta-glammed flower shots and found this intensely soothing bathe in a Japanese forest:

It is quite a pretty flower, but not a very long walk from a good white geranium, looks-wise. Like many other flowers, the older blooms go transparent when they get wet. The thickness of the petals means this is quite distinctive. A good White King Cup might do something similar, but given I can only find it for sale as seed, chances are you'd actually get a lot of King Cups in the native, cheerful yellow  (which is OK by me). That's a flower that need proper wet feet, and I do wonder if Diphylleia needs the same.

Although if my local area continues its slide into temperate rain forest, both may become a good prospect.

#circulareconomygarden for february

The first seed was sewn the day I took a bag of couch grass from my allotment to the tip. "Let me help you with that," said the Helpful Waste Operative, and plucked it from my hands. It was so heavy it nearly put his back out as he swung it into the skip, but they rode it out, a touch of bravado and a carefully repositioned leg. Humans, good at lifting. But this human was hefting a thing that had been mine and was now going to the municipal composter and suddenly I felt bereft.

Damn-it that was MY biomass. What am I doing, giving it away? It belonged on the patch it came from, turning steadily into more soil, which could create further biomass and so on and so forth, forever, and ever.  Only one reason to take biomass off a space; that's to put it on another space that needs it more. The municipal composter was kind of that and yet not. No, this biomass was mine, and needed to stay on my patch. Now, I've not managed to make compost out of couch grass (yet) but I have managed to rot it down, reduce it, shrink its territory in the allotment, and compact it. Since that bag, I've not taken anything green or brown off the plot. Only genuine rubbish.

Can I do the same out back in my garden? We have some crazy growers out there. The privet hedge, the Douglas and Cherry Laurel back hedge, the grape vine. We have nasty perennial weeds; bindweed, alkanet, woundwort, enchanter's nightshade. Or as I prefer to call them, Evil String, Needle Leaves, Armpit and Maggot Weed. But could all this be rotted, reduced, contained or squirrelled out back? I want to make a proper fern wall under my culinary shelf; that will need wood and leaves. The insect towerblock behind my compost bin can compact down once we've moved out of hibernation time. Weed leaves can be chopped and left for the slugs and worms.

But what of the Evil String? Word is that if you can keep it dry for three weeks, it might die. Could dried string be useful? There's also an argument for tolerating some bindweed; it's not useless to insects, and the white trumpets are quite bright.

Needle Leaves I do compost at the moment, chopping the growing plate into pieces. This probably isn't the best idea (they can regrow from partial roots) and is filling my compost with those evil little silicon needles. Bees love them. I have very mixed feelings, but I think they're probably best bullied, as I do for buddleia (cut off greenery as soon as it appears, when it's young and fresh).

Armpit could probably strengthen my fern wall with its long stringy root-stems, while not destroying the wall (as I rather suspect bindweed would). So I might be more for transporting that.

Maggot weed, though. The little white maggoty roots surround and out-compete other plants' roots. I have to pull it up wherever I see it. It can reproduce from the tiniest root fragment. It runs from flower to seed like lightning and has a germination reliability that far exceeds may plants with awards of garden merit.

Well, I shall have to take that as a challenge. Can I manage my #circulareconomygarden this year? Currently at: 0 visits to the tip. 

urban greenvasion: no more clean lines

Architects, Designers, couturiers, they all start with a clean line. When reality blurs that line, it creates a problem. Consider:

• Pockets shaved off a skirt for ruining the line
• Weeds burned from the edge of pavement for trapping litter
• Lintels and ledges excerpted from buildings to avoid creating spaces where birds might land, where fowl might foul

Ligne clair was drilled into me from early age, by teachers, parents, elders, gatekeepers who derided rough lines as messy, scrappy, dirty, or even, most disgustingly,  as "hairy" using that term as a catch-all term (particularly in the feminine context) for bad. But the resulting pictures have less presence. They float, like architects' ghosts, failing to cast shadows or achieve mass. They abstract reality, in all its messy urgency, in favour of the line.

But, what is the line worth? Presence reduced to an almost-absence, guidelines dodged and dabbed away, it is less, not more, and it is certainly not enough for anything to grow in until there has been some entropy, some erosion, some accretion. But all this dirt and damage is swept away, repaired away, cleaned away, plucked away, to reveal the clean lines.

I say, no more clean lines. Reality is hairy. The maximalist, fully-activated city environment is the opposite of clean. Dirt gathers in its cracks and crevices and plants sprout from them, improvised and unplanned. The clean lines suffer what is perceived as a steady degradation, that needs to be scraped and scrubbed away in order to hold back the disaster of dilapidation. But what if instead it was elaboration, decoration, recreation, ornamentation?

As ever, there is are a quantity of things we need to get from here to there.

1. In general, waste needs to become less harmful A lot of city waste is pollutants, oil grime, tarmac and rubbers dust, and much human-created waste is worthless and nasty - scraps of gum and plastic, for example. Cigarette butts, one of the most famous examples, have been co-opted as ad hoc insecticide for overcrowded nest boxes. by birds all over the world, although research suggests this behaviour may cause trouble in the long term. Reduced toxicity and fewer non-degradable items will create a healthier growing medium.
2. A more graded approach to waste needs to be employed  Washing or burning or poising away anything that isn't in the architect's plan or the designer's vision ignores the reality of an item that exists through time and will grow and be grown over. Creating a waste approach that acknowledges harmful/non-harmful, toxic/non-toxic, dangerous/non-dangerous and which allows moss or vegetation grow-over where plausible is core. Speaking of which:
3. Moss-durable surfaces and buildings designed with grow-over in mind  Paved drives are destroyed by moss. Ivy prises window frames from their walls. Buddleia drives a vegetable crowbar between the gutter and the roof, and will eventually drop bricks on passers-by below. Pretending otherwise won't help. Acknowledge the damage potential of vegetation, but build with its inevitability in mind. Not with the high-tech flourishes of green walls or roofs (much as I love these) but with textural control, guarded seams, sacrifice layers.  
4. A change in our attitude to urban animals and birds the great providers of poo in the urban environment (apart from us) need to shift out of urban clutter and into indicators of a vibrant urban ecosystem. At the moment there is a bit of an idealistic tree-hugger/perfomative sorry-but-to-be-a-realist divide, with neither side actually getting us where we need to go, which is to a human-commensurate semi-maintained, semi-wild stable urban biosphere. I suspect that approaching it unsentimentally, almost as a farming task, might produce the best results, but I would say that - I'm from a farming background.  
5. Public compost bins Not in isolation! I'm using public compost bins as a kind of marker, an example of taking a different attitude in the city centre, where we are all taking care of our urban climate and biosystem, keeping our urban heat island animal and plant friendly in winter, using water and plants to cool it in the summer, maintaining and building up our soil, using the nutrient richness of the human-shaped environment to create slicks of rich vegetable growth, which exude moisture that raises the clouds to wash the streets.

Michigan ghost apples

It's been an unseasonably warm winter, so I've been more worried about it being cold enough to prune my apple than so cold as to damage it, but looking through my old folders I found a reference to the Michigan Ghost Apples. These were created when an ice storm covered half-rotted apples left on a tree over winter. When the orchard owner went out to prune & tidy, he found ice moulds that had formed around the apples, and persisted while the innards turned to mush and drained away (you can see the mush exit holes on the bottom in some of the shots).

Not caught on film, but described in some of the articles about this phenomenon, was the orchard owner recounting that they had found some apples still inside their ice moulds, but that the act of moving the ice, or the heat from their hands, caused the rotten apple to drop, leaving behind these creepily perfect moulds.

I was put in mind of them by Crazy Delicious, a cooking show which takes place in an edible garden complete with a cheese cave, edible soil and a prosecco fountain.

This dish, a savoury apple dessert, frustrated the competitor because nothing froze fast or perfectly enough, meaning that her apples were puckered and curiously sinister. The judges, they loved that, and so did I  - they look strangely like the amazing Michigan ice apples, only (very) delicious.

counting the cost of storm ciara

Up on the allotment, the lid had blown off my compost bin. I found it two plots over, in a tangle of brambles. It's easy to tell which one's mine, because of the fire damage. I banged it back on, securely as I could. That'll keep the rain off allotment fox's noodle.

There was some sogginess. No actual squidginess, though, so I think I'll not worry about having to do something about it. I shoved in some parsnip seeds (it's probably warm enough) though the amount of couch grass in the soil is as ever intimidating. It's been warm enough to get that started, certainly.

The peas were looking a bit cold so I gave them some sticks to slow down air around them (I've planted Meteor, to see if going early will work for peas as it does for broad beans). I was dissatisfied with the fleece/bubble wrap I tried on some early seeds (in comparison, the ones without the covers grew better) so I'm going to look at using brown waste (hard sticks of perennial plants etc.) instead. Added benefit that I can just source it from the edges of the allotment.

Back in the garden, branches had blown off the neighbour's tree, and an empty bucket had fallen over.  That was about it. I'm still worried about the aerial that's on the piss, but it didn't get any worse in the storm.

I have  a broader worry attached to TV aerials, though.

See, mine (I have two, plus a satellite dish out front) aren't doing a whole lot any more, signal-wise. There's a cable doing all the lifting. But the birds love them. Goldfinches sit on them and sing. Jackdaws bicker and play around the chimneys, starlings line up like commuters waiting for the 9 o'clock breeze to fly off on. They're the treetops of the skyline, and I feel uncertain at the thought of removing them. I remember my mum's account of how an entire row of council houses in view of her last place had everything shaved off the roofs, chimneys and all, and how the long bare skyline no longer saw as many birds, no longer was of as much interest. Maybe it would be good to replace them, instead, with something more tree-like, more branched, and to adapt the chimney to provide nesting space. But maybe even that would be wrong. One of the best things we can do for nature is to be reliable, and not remove habitats that are established.

I didn't do the Big Garden Birdwatch this year. There comes a point, visible in the cracks  as I watch the endless documentaries on the nature channels  where tourist-like scientists damage the reefs as they complain about the scientist-like tourists damaging the reefs, and cameras record and re-record it all, where even study is damage and even recording harms the recorded item, and in the words of Fal Batz, the imaginary disaffected ornithologist conjured in Peter Greenaway's A Walk Through H, a count is as good as a kill. 

a dinosaur in every garden

and in every garden, a dinosaur.

age upon age, the moss returns

It's been a wet winter. Moss is sprouting everywhere. I was photographing this wall, when some old fellow (possibly literally a fellow, it being Oxford) came up to me and said "You've clearly never been to Devon," in response to my delight at this mossy, decaying wall.



   



I grew up in Devon and Dorset, where there are still pockets of temperate rainforest. In autumn, there were mists, sometimes for weeks. In spring, rain fell like a waterfall. Rhododendrons rambled out of the old estates and coloised the acid bogs, alongside the blackthorn and myrtle. The weather seeped up from the sea and ran back to join it. The air would smell sometimes of seaweed, a tang in the air. I loved living by the sea. Yet I moved back to Oxford, the most landlocked of British cities. It's still wet, though, and wet means green:



This building has been empty for a while. Already the green is back to claim it. The wire put on the roof to discourage pigeons has been breached, and the moss is building. The boards put on the frontage to discourage squatters stand firm, but around them, grass is growing. Up on the roof, lights in an upstairs room suggest occupation, if only by a trickle of utilities to stave off the black mould. Above a bathroom fan outlet, a fern garden has grown, anchored in the moss choking the gutter.



The print on the boards on the frontage pick up the green that is engulfing the building. Impotent pigeon spikes are belied with passionate cooing from every nook and crevice. The birds and the plants don't take long to take back their space.



And out the front, a new grassy sward is growing in the crevices of this artificial cliff:

thoughts about wounded trees

It's winter and we all have the lurgy. Old injuries are playing up, infections are up and about, waving their sickly tendrils. The slings and arrows are harder at this time of year. The wind bites, storms knock, rain drenches. The cold gets everywhere. Most years, trees would be sleeping aroundabout now. But this weekend I had to grit my teeth and do my winter prune in the warm, hoping that not too much sap was rising...

The early trees, the Service Bush and the Winter Cherry, already have swollen buds. The terrible insect damage on the Service Bush has crusted around with woody overgrowth. It's now been two years since the final demise of the beetle grub and the damaged stem is not only still alive, it's thriving. I never took any action to repair the plant, even though the grub left a nasty mess. There was so little to work with; the stem was the thickness of a pool cue, and the bark layer on a Mespilus is so thin, and the heart wood was thinner than a pencil, and full of dead beetle and frass.

The tree response to wounding is not to heal. Instead it compartmentalises the injury by growing healthy, new wood around the injury site, eventually covering it over with new growth. The injury remains, entombed and enrobed in a flood of new, healthy wood. Barrier zones within the transport cells (the famous xylem and phloem) prevent passage of pathogens and decay bacteria from the wounded area to the healthy wood. The wound is steadily brought inside the tree, stabilized, covered over. Cavities may be compartmentalised or flooded with new wood, depending on their size and location. This all takes time.

While I was finding this out, I discovered an internet full of American online guides about how to save damaged trees, and lots of British ones about how to hold people or organisations liable for damage caused by trees. Different perspectives, trees and damage.

There is a technique practised by arboriculturists called scribing, where the damage to the tree is tidied, bark trimmed to a smooth oval, the injury cleaned and made tidy. I didn't do this to my tree. I left the ragged edges to heal on their own. I find myself wondering if this is not something more done by and for the human caring for the tree, to indicate that the tree is valued and not available for firewood or random destruction. It also probably makes for an aesthetically attractive knothole.

Returning to my thoughts on tree protection, and preventing fatal damage to mature trees in cities, I found this lovely guide to supporting building contractors to make better choices around management of trees on or near construction sites. "Keep a close eye on all operators, be quick to let them know you mean business about unnecessary roughness."

My Service Bush is a stressed plant. Its root system is small and constricted. It could still decline and die from this injury, which is dangerously close to the base of the trunk, and if rot gets into that, the whole plant goes. The injury is too old for clever tricks like bridge grafts and ring-barking, and filling the cavity would be counterproductive. But it's also a strong and wily plant. I have high hopes, that while it may not recover fully, it will achieve closure.