Pimp your Pavement
Have you been into a Poundland lately?
Before you choke and splutter on your tea, I’ll say that it’s a brilliant place for buying random necessities like toothpaste, knee highs and deodorant for a fraction of the price you would pay in supermarkets or chemists.
Surprisingly Poundland, well, in Brixton at least, also has a fair selection of seeds, bulbs and even bedding plants, which at, er, a pound a bag makes them a bargain. With spring in the air and pollen in my nose, I’ve recently spent more than a few minutes looking at the brightly coloured varieties and wondering what to do with them.
The sad truth is that they’ve remained on shelf, for the garden that I share with its owners is simply too refined, too sedate, to suffer a garrulous band of newcomers from the wrong side of the tracks. So, how do I rescue said plants from a life of halogen lighting without causing horticultural disharmony and – if you’ll excuse a pun on that cliche – a riot of colour?
Queue Richard Reynolds, the enterprising man behind guerillagardening.org and his new project – and one after my own heart – called Pimp Your Pavement.
Heard of it yet? It’s encouraging us, or everyone within sight of pavement at least, to plant up its empty spaces, tree pits especially, with flowers and shrubs, and the Pimp Your Pavement website gives good hints and tips to help you get your own section of pavement looking more cheerful.
In the past, Richard has tackled some quite large projects, notably the neglected municipal areas close to his flat but, for the average person, taking on that kind of thing can be rather daunting, and without tremendous commitment it is almost bound to fail. The last time I tried guerilla gardening, in Durban some years ago, a little Felicia amelloides I planted and hoped would spread was repeatedly mown down by a municipal tractor driver merely doing his job.
The small dead space beneath the tree outside my front door, however, is rather more manageable and less likely to receive any attention at all, save the odd bit of fertilizing urine from one Brixton’s many dogs. Time to head back to Poundland.
She’s Here!
What I loved about this spring day (yes, she’s here, spring is finally here):
Putting bed linen out on the line to dry for the first time since, er, October, and leaving the sun and wind do their work.
Making lemon cupcakes with two twelve-year-olds and realising that it doesn’t matter if the icing isn’t perfectly smooth, or that the sponge didn’t rise as much as it ought to have done. Together, butter, sugar and flour will taste good no matter what you do to them.
This year’s first tulips.
At the end of the day, a man leaning out of a top floor window and having a fag.
Hearing a delivery man wish a customer well with her pregnancy.
The deep-plum leaves of a prunus against a sage-green wall.
To the west, the sun setting over a hundred chimney tops, which made me think of this:
Suffolk Seaside
There are certainly more exciting places in the world to visit than Suffolk’s villages, but then one doesn’t generally associate places with names like Walberswick, Saxmundham and Yoxford with bright lights and dancing girls, anyway.
That’s not to say you wouldn’t find dancing girls in the district. It’s just that, well, in that part of the world, the odds are best placed on you attempting to stumble home by the bright light of the North Star after a heady night with Peronelle’s Blush – a local cider laced with a shot of blackberry liqueur.
By day the quirky fishing villages along the coastal strip from Aldeburgh to Southwold are redolent of an older England, where, it seems, no ill could happen.
‘That’s a myth,’ I was told. ‘That England has never existed.’
Well, I expect that’s true but it didn’t stop me filling up a couple of memory cards – what an apt term – with pictures.
One morning, on a beach near Dunwich, we met some fishermen, one of whom had noticed the flash of a herring in the shallows and had caught the fish with his hands. It gulped and gasped for air while he held it.
‘Would you like it?’ he asked in a Suffolk burr. ‘It’ll need gutting.’ It felt like a test; a challenge for an out-of-towner fretting about a suffocating fish.
‘Ok. If you bash it on the head,’ I answered, remembering vaguely that I had gutted the one and only fish – a trout – that I have caught on a fly.
He took a pebble to its skull and wrapped it in a bag for me to take home. Rigor mortis had set in by the time we got in and in the end I didn’t gut it. It was baked whole and given to Treacle dog instead, which seemed a bit like wasting a life.
The fishermen said the cod have been slow this year.
This boat, pulled up on Aldeburgh beach next to a tumbledown shed advertising potted crab, hasn’t been out in a long time.
And some seaside pioneers, hardy things growing where nothing else will. Any idea what they are?
Catching Up
Shall I let you in on a secret? There is a very useful tool on these WordPress dashboards. It is a function that allows you to write a string of blog posts, save them, and set WordPress to post them at a date of your choosing.
I have been toying with the idea of using this, of settling down one Sunday afternoon and taking care of a month’s writing in one sitting, for some time now. It would certainly be convenient and spare you the frustration of seeing stale pages for days on end but, somehow, to the small percentage of perfectionist in me, being so efficient feels like cheating. And surely you would know.
Wouldn’t you?
No. We Hamblys are made of sterner stuff and from now on I resolve to be more regular in my posting. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” our Grandpa Fred always used to say.
It does fall on me to add, however, that I have thought of you often this past month while I have been holed up, working in-house on someone else’s Mac, and unable to do my usual amount of blogging.
My head has been ticking over with all sorts of things, though. This is some of what’s been on my mind:
A pretty, patterned blouse and cashmere jumper that I bought from Traid recently in the name of research for this. I have also popped up here and, golly, even here.
The roses. Oh! The roses. I know every gardener has their own take on pruning but I suspect I have been a little too enthusiastic with the lopper-thingys too late in the season. If ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ does put in an appearance this summer, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Butter biscuits and whether it’s appropriate to use a recently acquired reindeer biscuit cutter in April. What do you think? At last count – last week – I had 19 different cutters and I haven’t bought a single one of them. I think my friends are hinting.
Rare-breed chickens and whether they would survive Brixton’s pitbulls and foxes, not to mention my landlords. Probably not.
Whether spring will ever arrive properly.
Treacle, the Newfoundland dog, who is giving my fella a run for his money. ‘Look,’ said Fella the other day. ‘I don’t say I don’t do this but I bet Treacle makes awful smells in bed.’
The picture of the daffodils was taken inside Blythburgh church, Suffolk, last weekend.
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