On a full day's training in an old canal town, feeling restless at lunchtime, I went for a walk, in the spring mud, along the canal. There, lit by uncertain spring sunshine, in the backs of a working area, all warehouses and workshops, I found this, the very beginning of a garden:
A door in a wall, and a path worn through the vegetation. Here, very standard British shadeland scrub, brambles and ivy, cleavers and cow parsley. It's too early for nettles, but they will be right along in a moment. There wasn't a fag butt in sight so I don't think this is the smokers' exit. My guess is it's the night janitor, or the daily commute.
This one shows a small evolution towards tended space: trellis to mark the ownership of the wall, and protest graffiti. In the deep shade under the trees, the door light was on.
I liked the contrast of the single green leaf and the turquoise door here. In sheltered spaces, deciduous trees have been holding a few leaves through the winter. That three-stemmed ash, which has been trimmed back from encroaching on the door, strikes an elegant note.
Here, the paint is fresh and the ivy has been cut. A forbidding red door; one imagines a pot of paint inside the doorway, ready to paint out graffiti the moment it lands.
This one had almost a clearing outside it, as if a regular mill of people kept it flat; but not a scrap of rubbish. It is tidied, it is kept, it is, however basic, a garden, guarding the door, that point of ingress, a shade-point between the public space of the path and the canal, and the private work-space of the industrial estate. An owned verge.
I did wonder if the clearers of the space were drinking teens, but the absence of even a scrap of the usual garbage of such spaces (bottles, condom wrappers, fag butts) suggested these doors were in some sense verboten, not available, closed. Of course, this is catnip to a tagger.
Halfway down the canal backs, I found a broken bridge end which was the actual teen hangout; vodka bottle grass ground into the grass in the traditional style. While these puzzling warehouse gardens with their sinister tree guardians were left, bar brief graffiti-motivated excursions, clearly used, but also strangely deserted.
A door in a wall, and a path worn through the vegetation. Here, very standard British shadeland scrub, brambles and ivy, cleavers and cow parsley. It's too early for nettles, but they will be right along in a moment. There wasn't a fag butt in sight so I don't think this is the smokers' exit. My guess is it's the night janitor, or the daily commute.
This one shows a small evolution towards tended space: trellis to mark the ownership of the wall, and protest graffiti. In the deep shade under the trees, the door light was on.
I liked the contrast of the single green leaf and the turquoise door here. In sheltered spaces, deciduous trees have been holding a few leaves through the winter. That three-stemmed ash, which has been trimmed back from encroaching on the door, strikes an elegant note.
Here, the paint is fresh and the ivy has been cut. A forbidding red door; one imagines a pot of paint inside the doorway, ready to paint out graffiti the moment it lands.
This one had almost a clearing outside it, as if a regular mill of people kept it flat; but not a scrap of rubbish. It is tidied, it is kept, it is, however basic, a garden, guarding the door, that point of ingress, a shade-point between the public space of the path and the canal, and the private work-space of the industrial estate. An owned verge.
I did wonder if the clearers of the space were drinking teens, but the absence of even a scrap of the usual garbage of such spaces (bottles, condom wrappers, fag butts) suggested these doors were in some sense verboten, not available, closed. Of course, this is catnip to a tagger.
Halfway down the canal backs, I found a broken bridge end which was the actual teen hangout; vodka bottle grass ground into the grass in the traditional style. While these puzzling warehouse gardens with their sinister tree guardians were left, bar brief graffiti-motivated excursions, clearly used, but also strangely deserted.
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