Keeping nature close
Daisy growing in the cracks of the streets
‘Keep nature close. Be careful where you tread, for there is beauty underfoot.’ A Shinto saying.
At 10.00 this morning a council man dressed in acid-yellow, set to work with his hoe, and in half an hour a street was cleared of 54 different varieties of plants. They had grown vigorously along the roadside edges in winter’s accumulated dust and dirt. Nurtured and nourished by city detritus and early spring rain they had flowered, lighting up the black road with their whites and yellows like stars in the dark night sky.
We had never planned it to be like this. ‘This’ being locked up, city bound, hungering for a nature elsewhere in someone else’s countryside. So nature came to us. We began to notice the small things around us and we allowed them to lighten our frightened spirits.
On a wet day in March just after this contagion had begun to stalk our streets, I was walking fast to the shop to gather our essential supplies. I was in gloomy spirits as pedestrians scurried into the road to avoid one another other, avoiding eye contact and holding their breath as they passed. The warmth of human relationships which has sustained this species for so long had now reverted to suspicion and fear. As my steps beat upon the concrete slabs, I saw growing through a crack cups of joy, more precious than gold. It was a celandine.
Cracks in pavements were once feared. The alarming miasmas and distempers of former plagues rose up from the earth and poisoned the air that men breathed, causing them to die. Or so it was believed. We are wiser now - possibly - and these cracks no longer portend death, but life.
Spring moved from darkness into light. With each small journey over the following weeks a new world opened up to me. Some of the plants of course I knew, others I had to look up. I carried a wildflower book on my shopping trips, and spent the queuing time identifying those plants I did not know.
Guerrilla plants, exiled plants, escaped-from-garden plants, all be-jewelled, plated, cupped and cloaked, all compelling. They exuberantly littered the ways. Each flower, each leaf, each seed pod, became a little world of wonder, a little piece of magic. Really magic for since March it has barely rained, yet they live, even thrive. Take the little street violas of white and blue, just a few yards from a neighbour’s door, for instance - each weekly bloom more splendid than the last. They are not watered, nor dead-headed, unlike their soft hybrid cousins in the pots outside my door. These, without their daily dose of London waters sprayed from a hose, take the quick and dehydrated route to death.
This greening, these rough boundaries, the disorder and spontaneity has tapped into the contemporary mood. The press and social media are buzzing with the antics and campaigns of groups such as More than Weeds and who (illegally) write the names of plants on the pavements where they grow. In France, Boris Presseq’s video - showing him chalking names of street flowers has been watched 7 million times. As Rodney Burton’s, ‘Flora of the London Area’ (1983) has shown there are over 2000 species of wild plants within 20 miles of St Paul’s Cathedral. Our London plant community, is rich and vibrant, and full of émigrés mingling with the natives.
The cutting of the much-maligned and exiled god-king plant, the dandelion, was the hardest to bear. For weeks I had watched it grow from princely green through to the moment when it was crowned with its regal golden feathered head-dress. Now it lay slain at the feet of its conqueror, the man with the hoe.
There are others too, whose presence I now miss. Little familiars lighting up my path to the shop at the end of the road; rock speedwells, daisies, London rocket, thale cress among many others. Thale cress gives weeds a bad name because it is so untidy, un-pretty and spindly. Its a mass of unremarkable scintillas of white on a small head crown and stumpy seed arms rising up from spindly stems. It is not the type of plant to make one stop and stare. Yet, thale cress is the world’s most studied plant. This lowly plant is leading the way in disease resistance, in the creation of healthier edible oils, in the manufacturing of biodegradable plastics, and in the making of both hardier and cheaper fruits and vegetables.
A few days after the Yellow Gilet had done his work I walked along the hard straight lines of the roadside edge. There were tiny fragments of miracle green re-appearing amongst the jet black stones of the road. Cat’s ears, mouse ears, fleabanes and creeping bellflower, all making a bid for life. Seeing them so, lightened my day and I live in the hope that they will flower and flourish before the grim reaper returns with his hoe, bringing his own natural disaster.
