July 17th – Time for my annual botanically subversive mission: spreading the cowslip love.
After the usual delightful display in the spring, my favourite flowers have finally started to seed. I carefully collect the seed heads in a bag, shaking the seeds into it.
When I have plenty, I carefully spread the seeds on hedgerows, verges and anywhere that would benefit from springtime cowslips.
Guerilla seeding. Do something pretty while you can.
June 4th – I went to the steam fair at Draycott in the Clay, near Sudbury, and photos can be seen on my main blog here, but on the way back I took a route through Rolleston on Dove.
I haven’t been here for ages. The church is lovely (though impossible to get a good photo of at that time on a sunny evening!) and the village, still resolutely separate from Burton although perilously close, still retains a wonderful atmosphere with some great buildings and the river running right through it.
That lych gate was the site of me repairing a puncture at 7pm one Christmas Eve (I think in 2010) on my home from a chilly century in Derbyshire – it has a light in which proved very useful.
July 27th – It’s the time of year when I dread getting stopped by the police.
The cowslips I loved so much in the spring are now seeding, and I have in my pocket a growing bag of little black seeds, like these. I pluck a seed head or two from each clump (careful to leave enough to seed next year), and collect the wee black dots that shake out.
When I have a decent quantity, I’ll spread a few new patches in barren spots or places that would benefit from a little cowslip love.
These flowers cheer me so much, it’s like repaying my debt to them. I invite you to do the same.
July 15th – Also a pain is the himalayan balsam. This tall, beautiful plant is growing in abundance now, and flowering strongly on damp waste ground, stream banks and the hinterlands and margins. It’s beautiful pink/white, metallic-scented flowers hide the real problem: this is an invasive species introduced by the Victorians.
The plant grows so tall and thickly that it chokes all beneath it, yet once established, like japanese knotweed, it’s very hard to remove.
The A461 Pipe Hill at Lichfield, and most of the verges to the waterworks at Pipe Hill are full of the stuff, season by season edging it’s way to Muckley Corner.
A beautiful undesirable.
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