Tag: alien plants

Charlie’s radical garden

Impatiens taymonii in Charlie’s garden

Before you sigh and turn away for a bit more doomscrolling because I used a bit of latin at the top – be assured that this post is guaranteed to make you happy, so happy that I can’t imagine why I’m not charging you to read it!

So a long time ago we moved to Stoke on Trent to run a small but doomed pottery that lasted all of six months before it fell to earth. We were there at the same time the last bottle kilns were being demolished just down the road at Price’s teapot factory and one of our team was a wonderfully skilled, but recently redundant mouldmaker who’d helped to unpack the last kiln load as the factory shut down. It’s true he had a bit of a drink problem, and once came in from a 48 hour binge and mistakenly cleaned his beloved Triumph 2000 with kitchen scourer but I never met anyone else who could look at a complex sculpture, turning it one way and another and plan exactly how to make a twenty piece plaster mould from it.

Anyway, the local pubs had not then evolved to the point where Madame could drink in the public bar, and we were always directed to the snug where foul language and boy’s banter were banned. The snug in our local sported a lovely Busy Lizzie in a pot. It was huge, and when Madame mentioned what a lovely plant it was the landlady simply picked it up and gave it to her with a big smile. A couple of months later it travelled back to Bristol with us in our overloaded Morris 1000 pickup and it spent the next couple of years following us around in our peripatetic existence. We were often surprised by the kindness of people we hardly knew.

The Busy Lizzie is a member of the fairly large family known as Impatiens, one of which is a bit of a rogue and causes all manner of problems in this country where, since it escaped from gardens in the mid 1800’s has spread rapidly across the country with the help of its explosive seed pods which can fire their contents twenty feet. Its name, of course is Himalayan Balsam. There are four members of the family listed in my go-to list of British and Irish wildflowers, and two of them grow on the Kennet and Avon canal – on the left Orange Balsam and on the right Himalayan Balsam – the plant that the Daily Express loves to hate.

There’s another member of the family charmingly known as Touch me not Balsam that’s much rarer and only a couple of days ago I was wondering how I could lure Madame into the campervan for a quick trip to mid-Wales where it grows wild. I claim not to be a trainspotter but I can confess to getting a bit over obsessed with photographing whole families of plants. There’s another family I’ve got (Madame might say) overfamiliar with; they’re the Fleabanes and so far I’ve found four of them growing locally but five and six are harder to find.

So with this in mind, I must introduce our friend Charlie who is a taxonomist (but I forgive him), a retired professor, no less, who has worked in some very high-profile positions which I won’t mention to protect his privacy. He lives about four doors down from us and we meet up weekly to chat and for Madame to blag plants from his unusual garden. Charlie and I share a bit of a passion for the plants that eke out an existence on the walls and pavements and waste ground that surrounds us in Bath. They have a classification all of their own; ruderals, aliens and survivors – like most of our neighbours here. In fact we agreed yesterday that it would be fun to work together on as comprehensive a list of local bruisers as we can manage given our arthritic knees and hips. I’m getting used to people stopping and asking if I’m alright as I struggle to stand after getting down and dirty with my phone, photographing a pavement specimen.

There are rules about recording plants on the national database, but plants rarely pay any attention to rules and so seeds attach themselves to car tyres and shoes and travel distances from their proper places before dropping off and starting a new life on the streets. Other seeds blow in on the wind and fall out of window boxes or get a new start in life outside a pub where someone had too much to drink and – need I continue? The tomato is a favourite addition to the local flora. The rules are quite clear. “Thou shalt not record a plant growing in a garden.” By chance both Charlie and I were inspired in the last few weeks by reading Trevor Dines new book “Urban Plants” which is one of the few botanical textbooks either of us have read from cover to cover and I’ve also been reading Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s “Alien Plants” , and we both came to the same conclusion – that the word “wild” is so poorly defined as to be almost impossible to use. Field botanists have a whole lexicon to separate different classes of wildness, but gardens – especially Charlie’s garden – present some proper challenges.

My Mum would carry a large and larcenous handbag marked swag in which she would carry away thumb and finger cuttings of any plants she liked without regard for their rightful owners. Charlie’s garden does the same but with an international range, which makes it a lovely place to sit and drink tea,or coffee and yesterday – tragically – I spotted two of my hoped for “wild” flowers growing right in front of me. The first, which is the photograph at the top of this post, turned out not to be the hoped for Touch-me-not balsam but the Chinese species daymonii which is a proper garden plant that shouldn’t be recorded because it doesn’t grow in the wild and hasn’t been recorded even as a garden chuckout survivor in this country. But isn’t it beautiful? such lovely markings on the petals and a worthy posh cousin to the others. Good news, then, the Mid Wales trip is still on but don’t tell Madame.

However the next plant to catch my eye was a nice specimen of Tall Fleabane (Fleabane number five) which has never been recorded close to Bath and, in any case was growing in a pot. But at least I’ve photographed it and I’ll keep it for reference until I find a genuine wild version.

Tall Fleabane in Charlie’s garden.
Buckwheat,

There was also a rather nice Buckwheat plant which could easily have blown in on the wind, or been hiding in some garden compost – again not one for the record, but then – just as we were leaving – my eye caught a very small member of the carrot family which I vaguely remembered because I’d seen it twice before, growing in a newly planted municipal border and again wild near a stream south of Bath. It was almost hidden below its more showy neighbours but I had to check it out and when I did it brilliantly demonstrated the dilemma for those of us who like to make records. Here it was growing just inside a garden – so it shouldn’t be recorded – but on the other hand it’s hard to imagine why Charlie would have sown it deliberately in such an unsuitable position. The plant is Fools’ parsley and it’s short, not remotely beautiful (apart from to me) and extremely poisonous. One for the record then because I’ll call it a weed – and thanks for the coffee Charlie. See you next week.

Fools Parsley -Aethusa cynapium –poisonous!

Railway sidings, docksides, canals? I’m taken back into the past.

It’s a Mullein – can’t officially say which one until it’s been verified, but our local Country Recorder says that if I’m right it would be a great find.

I’m indebted to Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s marvellous book “Alien Plants” for much of the historical perspective in what follows.

I don’t suppose anyone knows what a Lamp Boy did, getting on for a century ago; but back in the age of steam it was what we now call a gateway job into being a railway worker. Much of the menial and repetitive work on the railway was done by young people who would, today, be described as children. My dad – born in 1916, left school at 14 and among his first jobs he was a lamp boy. After a series of disastrous railway accidents; safety measures became part of the life-blood of the industry. I remember my Dad sitting at the dining table memorising every signal between Bristol and London or Derby (he changed regions several times). So polishing the lamps and lenses, replenishing the oil and trimming the wicks of the red and white lamps that were mounted front and rear of every train and all the points and signals across the country was the beginning of many a career on the railways; a high status job back in the day.

But of course there were plenty of other menial jobs that occupied young men and kept the country in profit in all our colonial pomp. International trade brought ships and their cargoes from around the world and sailors needed feeding. Most cargo ships carried supplies of food “on the hoof” as it were. Cattle, chickens and such like were often kept on ships and slaughtered to feed crews (or perhaps just the officers) on long journeys. The ships were loaded with fodder before they left and by the time they returned across the oceans they needed to be restocked with grain, hay and straw which, in those days before farm machinery, carried their burden of weed seeds back from abroad. When these ships docked – in Bristol, for instance, they were unloaded and then the holds were swept and all the manure was removed to the dockside where it would be sold off to local farms. The cargo would be loaded onto wagons or railway trucks and narrow boats for transportation to further places. The dockside, canal and railway sidings were a happy hunting ground for botanists like James White. These days we still find unexpected plants which are spread by passing lorries on roadside verges which, it seems, are especially attractive to salt-loving stowaways.

So drawing all those threads together we have James White publishing his invaluable 1912 book “The Bristol Flora” after hunting for all those casuals in the places they were spilled or blown; and one of the biggest railway sidings in Bristol was at St Phillips Marsh where my Dad polished his first lamps before a long career with the Great Western and London Midland and Scottish – still separate companies in those days. For all I know, he may have stepped over my plant or one of its nine cousins as he crossed the lines at work as a child. He once told me about a mass migration of rats from the stables when he said they were so many it felt like a moving sea. Freight trains were loaded at the dockside and passed through the sidings which were almost alongside the Feeder Canal which connected via a navigation section along the River Avon, into the Kennet and Avon canal flowing east towards London past our flat and just up the road from where the plant, mentioned by White, is (possibly) now growing over a century later.

So is my solitary plant a sighting or a history lesson? I like to think it’s both. Even so-called scientific disciplines are set within a broader culture

If you were to do a word search on this blog for “canal” (please feel free, it’s great fun) you would find many mentions of the Kennet and Avon because it’s now a significant part of the life of the Potwell Inn. We walk one section of the bank at least once a week and it never fails to deliver plants that I’ve not seen before. Some of them are medicinal herbs, probably planted by boaters in the past, who had little access to medical care. There is the usual brigade of thugs, vagabonds and chancers brought in by the wind, by birds, on the tyres of push bikes and the boots of generations of walkers. Some of them flower a couple of times and move on, or die in an unsuitable environment. Some set up permanent residence and some – Himalayan Balsam for instance – think to themselves whoopee! and raise families of thousands and tens of thousands. Lazy fly tipping by overtidy gardeners has led to Elijah’s revenge and we are whipped with scorpions. Then there are obvious garden escapes and plenty of native plants that just are – in all their beauty.

Then of course plants associate with insects and many other forms of wildlife and what we get – passing intact through many industrial, post-industrial and suburban areas are linear nature reserves of real significance. Abandoned railway lines; derelict docksides; old gasworks (too expensive to develop); post industrial sites polluted with heavy metals and land rendered unusable through flooding – they’re not pretty but in this age of industrial farming they probably furnish many of the richest wildlife habitats we can enjoy. Forget the SUV – you can probably walk out of your front door and abandon yourself to the wild in a walk of a couple of miles.

Guerilla gardening

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Yesterday I got excited about a patch of winter heliotrope on the canal side, but I didn’t mention the little guerilla garden that popped up just below Cleveland House a couple of seasons ago. I’m no expert when it comes to guerilla gardening, but I know of three sites in Bath that have been planted up and (more or less) maintained for a few years now. If you walked past looking at your mobile or with your head full of music, or ran past checking your heart rate and distance, or shouting at your children to mind the water -you’d never notice it – there’s only half a dozen square metres of it after all. But it just happens that it’s next door to a favourite patch of Pulmonaria (lungwort) which was not showing much more than leaves yesterday and it contained some winter savory in flower.

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From Clive Stace – “New Flora of the British Isles” 3rd edition

So how do we feel about these introduced and occasionally naturalized interlopers popping up here and there with a bit of human help. My “Atlas Flora of Somerset” has the plant established for a very long time on the walls of the manor at Mells. Stace has it naturalised in North Somerset – which may well refer to the same plants, so it seems to me to be completely pointless trying to establish its status as if it were applying for a visa. The brute facts are that this plant was almost certainly put there by the guerilla gardener(s)  who thought the patch was looking very neglected and needed cheering up. Maybe in a hundred years it will have naturalised and maybe it will just give up the ghost because it’s not in the right place – who knows? But yesterday it was in flower and looking very pretty in the shy sort of way that plants do when they’re surrounded by the usual badly behaved groundlings in disturbed soil.

It’s possible to get disquietingly touchy on the subject of alien plants, as if only ram-stamped British – no, English – subjects should be allowed. Is there a whiff of nativism in it? Neither plants, birds or insects respect our artificial borders – we’ve got a lovelorn parakeet hanging around on the allotment at the moment; should we shoot it in the pursuit of ecological purity or smile at its preposterous brightness against the winter trees?

There are a couple of serious points that should be made about planting up apparently neglected patches of ground. The first is that wildflowers often only show themselves for a brief period and then disappear again until next season. Most of us don’t notice that wildflowers adapt to their surroundings by timing their flowering period to coincide with any number of factors – space, daylight, pollinators – and probably many more.  The wonder of the weedy verge is succession and so although the patch of apparently boring ground may not be looking at its most showy today, in a month it might be a riot or a contemplative joy. As I discovered very early on in my botanical apprenticeship, not all dandelions are really dandelions, and not all of those green plants on verges are cow parsley. Wild plants have their own times and seasons and it’s not their job to provide us with year-round entertainment. I’ve come to see the random distribution of “wildflower seed mix” as just another form of vandalism alongside strimmers.

Another parallel point comes in a particularly poignant way here in Bath. The local council, bless them, always mindful of the strillions of visitors, like to make sure that the the grass and borders are a constant visual feast.  But to be honest, 50,000 tulips is a bit of an insult to any idea of biodiversity. God has an answer to bare earth, and it’s called weeds.  Weeds are beautiful, healing, occasionally poisonous, and home to billions of insects that feed birds and other insects. My mother, born in 1916, knew her wildflowers inside out; could predict the weather for the next few hours by looking at “Granny Perrin’s nest”  which, to my infant eyes, looked like a tall tree, and didn’t think of herbal remedies as the least bit ‘alternative’. She didn’t – to my knowledge – ever fly on a broomstick.

Teaching children to understand and recognise even a few local wildflowers and their properties (perhaps ‘gifts’ would be a better word), would do more to advance the battle against the coming ecological disaster than any number of wildlife documentaries. At Christmas our oldest grandson (7) showed me his new bird record book. Three pages of neatly ruled entries detailed all his sightings, and every one of them was a blackbird. I asked him if he’d seen anything else and he replied that he was only recording black ones at the moment.  It’s a start, that’s the thing. If we’re going to survive on this planet, the earth needs to be the object of our love and not just our understanding. So I hear what you’re saying, guerilla gardeners, but don’t be too quick to condemn the weedy patch or you might fall into the sin of municipal consciousness.