I think I must have some kind of aura that encourages complete strangers to come and engage with me. I’m not claiming any supernatural powers here, just the very ordinary skills of getting alongside people. I’ve spent hours on empty railway stations listening to very troubled people (more often than not, other men) who just want to unburden themselves. Maybe it’s my general scruffiness or perhaps because I seem not to have my head stuck up my arse and so I represent the unthreatening type. I’m short and a bit overweight and only Madame could see my gleaming virtues – and that’s not all the time! Funnily enough I was just typing that sentence and the doorbell rang. It was a young delivery driver and as he helped unload our groceries he opened up at length about his sadness that his army career hadn’t worked out as he hoped.
But this gift – if you can call it that – seems to be extending itself to plants. This year I’ve spent hours and hours searching for different species of fleabane. I’m ashamed to admit that I was provoked by the sheer competence of our County Recorder – call it the positive side of envy – and decided that I needed to get my head down for some serious plant hunting. So far I’ve found five of them, four of which I’ve found the jizz for – that’s a term birders use to explain how they can identify a peregrine falcon diving at 60mph without thinking about it. But having done all that work; photographing, measuring (size matters) and even buying a couple of second hand books, blow me if one of them didn’t pop up on the allotment next to ours. We’ve had Peruvian apples, rare fumitories, stone parsley and bullwort all dropping in to say hello and this week after an eighteen month stalking of a Hungarian mullein on the canal, two of them popped up on other allotments on the site and I’ve no idea why, except for the absence of herbicides and a general aversion to tidiness. It feels as if they’re coming to me for a friendly welcome.
Plants are surprisingly mobile and some – like my fleabanes betray something of that in their names; Canadian, Mexican, Argentine and Guernsey – usually referring to where they were first found. But some also are brought in by the plant trade and another one I saw this week – an Eastern Catnip – moved from Eastern America to a nursery near us and then strolled across the towpath to set up shop in a crack in the pavement. As I’ve recorded all these migrants it’s clear that words like “native” need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Even the sycamore is a bit of a boat tree, brought in from overseas, and the Sweet Chestnuts here and in the mountainous parts of France and Corsica were probably brought there by the Romans and have now embedded themselves in the “local” cuisine. Those who carp on about strangers and foreigners should obviously get a life and stop prowling suspiciously around the subject like a goat meeting an unfamiliar food for the first time. Looking back to some arcadian ideal time forgets that Britain (or if you really must – “Ingelland” could as easily be described as a desert, a sea or an ice sheet and the original inhabitants coming from almost anywhere in the world, east of Greenwich. We’re all more or less foreigners here; on this “septic isle” as William Connor of the Daily Mirror once described it back in the days when the Mirror was a proper newspaper.
Anyway that’s enough nostalgia for a bank holiday weekend. Things have been happening on the allotment at the dog end of one of the worst growing years we can remember, and after Madame staged a major rebellion when the idea of packing it in was mooted, we’ve been back on the job non-stop, clearing the ground ready for autumn and winter. I was watering the borlotti beans this evening when I realised that one of the key arguments in favour of gardening for improving mood is that caring for just about anything seems to release a flood of endorphins into the blood. The feeling of warm satisfaction I get when I’ve given some time to listen to someone is almost identical to the feeling I got tonight watering the beans which were looking a bit sorry for themselves. Today we filled the pond, weeded the fruit bushes and I fed and mulched the summer raspberries after giving them a good soak. We rarely talk while we work, but it’s always good to be there. There’s a lovely biblical image about being at peace that goes
Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid,
Micah 4:4
As it happens we have both a vine and a tall fig tree next to our plot and the heat this year has yielded a bumper crop. It’s been good and the good is invulnerable to the evil we see day by day on in the media.
