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.
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.
