The tulips have started blooming now in the garden. This year they are huge, dramatic, absurd. Even the species tulips have done amazingly well, growing in huge dramatic clumps.
I've found myself particularly fond of coronet tulips this year, though the white peony types (which become dramatically streaked with plum tones as they age) are very striking indeed. They are lighting up the garden.
Garden lighting is dimming now; we are rewilding, learning to love our weeds, resisting the dig, and with that, reducing light pollution (which seems not to be great for insects, though some birds get longer foraging times). Not that garden solar lights are what they used to be; every now and again, I dig a tiny item which long since lost its faint gleam out of a tangle of alkanet and sling it in the small electricals recycling, from where it is probably refiled into mixed waste for energy recapture.
I remember how delightful my first set of garden solar lights were, pulsing gently white along a path through the night. Over the years, they were optimised and cheapened, became smaller and lit more weakly. and now they are gone.
I wish I could navigate back to that sparkle in the night, though.
Maybe the approach back is through the wonder of bioluminescence. People spray coating plants in bioluminescent paint aside there's not much available though perhaps we're simply not dimming lights down far enough; I remember the shock of eating at Dans le Noir and seeing the faintest of weak glows from a weakly bioluminescent seafood dish, to frail to be seen except in complete darkness.
Otherwise we're looking to the garden wildlife to pick up the sparkles. Dormice glow and are a safer proposition than garden scorpions and glowworms and fireflies would be lovely but they don't live round these parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment