It's been a warmish month, and the flowers have come on fast, indoors and out. February in the garden has brought snowdrops and bulbicodium daffodils outside, orchids inside.
As a pet owner, one of my regular activities is deburring. In comes one of the furry ones, pleased as punch, carrying a little freight of seeds and burrs discovered in my garden, the next garden, the verge, the scrub behind the wheelie bins at the back of the estate.
They find them at all times of year, even the depths of winter.
The standard weeds and seeds I brush from everything are like a skipping rhyme: Creeping Buttercup, Couch Grass, Enchanter's Nightshade, Barley Grass, Wild Oats, Alkanet, Euphorbia, Herb Robert.
The plants my garden would be, if I'd just stop planting all that other stuff in them.
Plants, the odd exception notwithstanding, are rooted to the spot.
But they travel far and often very fast, either generationally, in the form of seeds, or as fragments, as many parts of a plant can can take root spontaneously. They travel by wind and water, and in the stomachs of animals. They travel on you, on me.
Don't think they travel on you? Think again. Scientist carefully vacuumed samples of clothes and bags on visitors to Antarctica, and found (in common with most animals, the wind, duck's feet and indeed rocks) humans are a vector for plant propagation.
Visitors carrying seeds average 9.5 seeds per person, although as vectors, scientists carry greater propagule loads than tourists. Annual tourist numbers (∼33,054) are higher than those of scientists (∼7,085), thus tempering these differences in propagule load. Chown et el 2012
Even among the small numbers of seeds I handle, many of them are as small as dust. The ones that come from my orchids and airplants - smaller. Me and my furry assistants scampering round in service of our vegetative overlords, scattering seeds as we go.
Of course it is always important to read the research in the context of its funding. In this case, this useful summary provided by IATTO (International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators) is instructive. But it's also important to look at it in the context of prejudicial attitudes.
Adverts for cruising to Antarctica bookend my experience of wildlife documentaries nowadays. The value of knowing something exists is intensified by experiencing it, seeing it, and yes - smelling it; and so we go, and so we look, and dandelions bloom in our footprints.
There's a pile of concern, but it brings discomfort, to me; a lot of the guidance and guidelines and studies come down to; I should be allowed to travel. But not you.... and that is a difficult position to take.
Wind blows, birds fly, humans travel; and all of us with seeds in our feet, our feathers, our hair, under our nails and in the air in our lungs.
We breath in the fresh air of a new city, and breathe out orchids.
Last February in the garden was a distracted time. I was drawn away by stuff happening elsewhere and urgent. See Feb 7: "overwhelmed by it all".
 |
| Gardening record calendar February 2022 |
A few things are still in my worry list: "Spriggy looking thin". This is not referring to the width of my privet hedge, but how well leaved it is. In winder nowadays it looks twiggy and a bit bare. It's still there, plus the topiary chameleon is becoming misshapen. Time for a change?
"Happier up ladders" is nice to see. I was terrified of working at height after the post-stroke treatment left me fainting. But "kept dropping twigs on face" suggests that the visual field problems were still bugging me a lot.
Finally: "are there wild hellebore?" Yes, my hellebore are self-seeding nowadays. Like my year-on-year Nigella, I can see how the fancy hybrids produce a simpler plant, ;less doubling, clearer, smaller, paler blooms. Not wild yet, but the beginning of the process of feralization.
I've been re-reading the screenplay of a film I was very fond of, The Falls by Peter Greenaway. This is a surrealist experimental series of 92 short films about a "violent unknown event" (VUE) which was possibly the fault of birds (but perhaps not) and provoked a medical catastrophe for a subsection of humans who found themselves medically, emotionally, physically and linguistically changed by an event they could not understand.
Here's the trailer:
THE FALLS (Peter Greenaway, 1980) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
I was thinking about it in relation to two things, the first being The Big Garden Birdwatch and the second being the RHS calling on people to record weeds. In The Falls, naturalism is viewed with suspicion, the counters and the recorders and the observers interrogated for their intentions, with parallel drawn to hunting, and the cruelty of nursery rhymes, where birds die, repeatedly, fall, inevitably, stanza upon verse upon repetition upon rhyme.
One of the touchstone phrases in the The Falls is: a count is as good as a kill. This runs both ways; it is as good for the person (the twitcher, the birdspotter) to check the bird off the list, as to shoot it. But also the act of counting is often one of disturbance and distress: mist-nets, rings, the adrenaline rollercoaster of capture and release, and the invasion of your territory and space by giant carnivorous apes might not kill you, but it's not great for you either. It's a stressor. It really is.
And also for plants of course. Observation, handling, noticing, spotting. None of these actions are possible without changing what is observed. The act of study changes what it observes, and that change can easily include damage. But it's still better for the plant than yanking it up, pulling it out, burning it and destroying its seeds. A count is as good as a kill for the human doing the counting.
But for the thing being counted, it's definitely the better option.
In April 2021, I was very ill indeed. From time to time, I would start to do things, and then stop, defeated by the complexity of placing one thought in a sequence with another.
This post, abandoned in April 2021, consisted of two lines; the title, and this:
Lockdown and illness have beaten the garden quite hard.
It was interesting, trying to garden through the stroke. The damage to my vision had brought difficulties with light tolerance, with feeling confident in open spaces, with watering eyes that responded poorly to changes in light. Things appeared at the wrong distance, or blurred. At the same time I was depressed. I'm a public health professional. I know the impact that having one stroke has on future likelihood of stroke incidence. My stroke had lost my faith in the future.
And it's hard to garden when you don't have faith in the future.
What about the title, though? What about the sea rice? Well, that I tracked down relatively easily.
A few weeks before I didn't write this blog post, I had read an article about Michelin-starred chef Ángel León and his interest in whether the grains of eel grass he had found growing in the sea could be eaten. I had read how it had been gathered by humans, maybe for a long time.
I started thinking about Octopus Gardens, and how people have started farming coral in shallow water.
These people are hybrid farmers, farming tourists, documentary makers, university staff and travellers alongside their coral. But all farms are human farms. That's how they exist. We are this era's megafauna.
Could we add Eel Grass into our commensurate species party? Have we done so already?
All this and more I couldn't express very well in words at the time.
As far as the ice blossoms go, I would not have been talking about frost flowers. I would have been talking about the slightly darker phenomenon, where an ice storm encloses blossom, and the flowers are encased in a vitrine of ice.
You can tell by the time of year. April is the cruellest month.
The chrysanthemum above is dead I think. Two years of neglect and some sharp snaps of cold have done for it. It's a tough cookie, but not -10 tough.
