summer in winter

We could do with a little light at this time of year. A little bit of summer in winter. So I'm flicking back through 2018, seeing what summer I have stashed for the winter months.



After the works on the tow-path this year, they put down wildflower mix in the disturbed earth. This patch was blooming in an area that had been torn to muck by heavy works vehicles.



One sunny morning, I found unusual bees on the ivy flowers on the tow path. With their pointy abdomens, sharp stripes and fluffy puffer jackets, they looked like a couture take on honey bees, taking in the best elements of hover fly and wasp. They turned out to be Ivy Bees, a recent arrival in the country from mainland Europe enjoying our warmer autumns.



On a day of September rain, we found light and warmth in the London Design Bienniale 2018. The rough/smooth tiles are made of polished coal; the pink thing is a tiny greenhouse.




One sunny day, I was in an unfamiliar railway station for a few minutes. Inbetween trains, I spotted the far wall growing a fern garden:

the bumblebee and strimmer

The allotment has bees. I didn't mention that, did I? At the far end, in a clearing in the middle of some brambles, are four beehives. The bees belong to the Treasurer. Today I met a few more people -- the Local Couple, who spotted me and came to check me out; the Romanian, whose plot is very developed (fruit trees, a grape vine, a spectacular tomato house) and of course the Keeper of the Power Tools, which gave me access to the strimmer.

I strimmed my paths and marked my borders. In the top corner, I kept getting warning buzzes. Sharp little hiss-like hums. I took my strimmer back a few steps and looked down into the heavy tussocks. There were runs down there; rat-runs, probably. And also a surpising number of bees. Solitary bees. And bumble bees.

As long as you don't hit the nest with the strimmer, a strimmer in your hand is probably the best way to discover a bumblebee nest. I gave the bee-busy area a broad berth and declared it fallow for the season. I'll need to give it a sign, probably, but I'd forgotten my writing tools. Rookie error.

Also my hat, but I was wearing UV sheild product on a bit of a bouff and my hair kept the sun off nicely.  

The strimmer's string ran out just as I was running out of steam. I killed the engine and checked it back into the shed, apologising aloud to anyone's afternoon I had been annoyingly buzzing at. The bees, certainly. Overhead a Red Kite craned down, checking me out. A crow flew by and dipped a piece of bread in one of the plumbed-in troughs, like a fable.

I lifted the weed supressor and shifted it to the next space. There was still a bit of couch grass under and I yanked out some. You never get it all. I found some chitting potatoes in the plant-pass-on zone and some beans in a dried pod on the weed suppressor. Some leftover broadbeans went in. I put down thick drills of parsnip, beetroot, radish, spinach. Easy peasy pop-up plants. Inbetween I put down wildflower, pot marigold, phacelia, drunken cottage style.

Lot of paving stones on the site. I shifted them uphill, laying them like Minecraft tiles over some more couch-grass. Ants mourned their losses. Carnivorous flies and little wasps hovered over the fresh-turned soil. A starling with a song like a car alarm sat on the fence, licking its chops. I found a fat, juicy leatherjacket, but nothing was sure enough of me yet to come down for it.

I'll bring them some treats next time. 

A mysterious garden

I was a bit of a  fan of the old secret garden in the Westgate Multistorey Car-Park (that's an earlier blog-post about it) before a massive demolition job reduced the car-park first to chewed concrete fragments, then to a colossal hole in the ground, and thence, by degrees, to the cathedral of commercetainment we have today.

From what I spotted the other day, from up in the leafy skywalk, it may be that the developers were also secretly (or not so secretly; the development explicitly set out to include and/or reference the existing buildings where possible) fans.



What are they building down there, surrounded by the dollhouse brick cliffs, and behind the no through road and works signs? I fired up my zoom for a closer examination.



Sinister black jumping blocks, white-lady type standing stones, some of the returning trees, uplights and strappy/shrubby planting.



Gone are the swirls of the old garden, but the shape still echoes the walls around it, with awkward angles and defiantly overlapping polygons. Those upturned stones look like escapees from Oxford's Story Museum ready to come to life, should the shopping centre ever fall quiet, and drag blank faced and stony tailed through the abandoned shops; or maybe they form a perhaps sinister echo of the rough prostrate stones that lie under the trees in the Paradise Square Peace Garden on the other side of the Westgate.



Look again at that first picture; strange long cobbles are waiting to be built into a decorative surface that will recall the old Westgate's cobbled garden, but this time in cool Millennial greys instead of straight-edge 80s browns; and cast your eyes up the wall; tensioned wires are waiting for the fast-growing creepers planted along the wall's base to make this the New Westgate's first green wall.



No idea what's going to happen to that old fence panel, or even if the tiny patch of green space behind will be part of the finished garden. Maybe it will stay interstitial; conflicted; untended, a little mysterious wildspace in the heart of the shopping centre.

small public garden space in jericho

Spotted on my way through Oxford's Jericho neighbourhood yesterday; a space that used to be all weeds and brambles has been cleared, replanted and three log seats added. It's hard to say if it's official or not, but it's certainly a tiny community garden. It's here, and from the look of it, it's been gardened long enough for the Google Streetview car to have seen it. But it's new to me.