Unusually, this post begins with today’s picture, which is the poppies flowering on the disturbed earth where the grass was dug up to build the new cycle lane along Harbourside. What amazed me was how quickly they grew, and everything else as well. Dandelions, cornflowers, tomatoes (Yes, I did say tomatoes.) Presumably, someone dropped one, and yet the plants have grown all along about a ten foot length of ground, and they're now growing like weeds, or wildflowers according to what you care to call them in a year that’s been a rotten one for tomatoes. The soil is a a cross between mud, sand and old building rubble, generously laced with salt which is not what any TV gardener is going to want, is it? Yet there they are, growing quickly and confidently and taking over the space left behind when the grass was dug up. I know it’s been a bad year for butterflies, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s because they’ve all moved down to Harbourside and into my garden. Yesterday I stopped counting at three dozen. Painted ladies, red admirals, cabbage whites, Dorset blues, Dingy Skippers (yes, that is their real name), Brimstones which are lovely pale yellow, Large whites, small whites… (and am I the only one thinking that whoever named them was running out of inspiration at that point?) I even saw a Small Heath butterfly, which proves my point about inspiration.
It’s starting to look as if my plan to move from bedding plants to what posher people call car park shrubs may have worked. These are the ones that are tough enough to withstand all weathers and temperatures and which flower a lot. You prune them once a year and their basic views about soil are ‘is that some soil? Great, I’ll grow in it!’ Sunny or shady, it doesn’t seem to bother them. A lot of them seem to be yellow or blue and that’s a combination that I’ve always loved so it suits me nicely. You can see our garden from the narrow lane that runs along the back of it, so people often stop to chat, and they’ve admired these plants too, and been surprised when they realise that they are, to quote someone ‘nothing special till you look at them.’
I suppose that sums up Harbourside too. Usually, everyone looks at the beautiful harbour and forgets the bumpy boggy grass. I tend to do it too but then the wildflowers grew and I really looked at them and saw the insects feeding on them and the swallows swooping to catch the insects and the robins and the starlings eating the worms and the sparrows eating the seeds. Then I started to notice how interconnected it all is and how beautiful little brown birds are.
I had to sneak across the cycle lane to the other side when I took the picture of the poppies, and about half a dozen cyclists rode by while I was sitting on the grass and looking and thinking ‘this is almost certainly the last summer day because the wind is getting stronger and we have thunder due so I intend to make the most of it.’ Cyclist number seven stopped to ask me. if I was okay, which was sweet of him, but it brought it home to me that none of them had seen what I was seeing.
This elderly gentleman did though, and he told me about the poppies in the French war graveyards. He got off his bike and had a look and enjoyed the butterflies too, but his memories were so very different because he was in his late eighties, which in itself gave me hope for the future, because he goes for a five or six mile cycle ride most days and we've always smiled at each other and exchanged a few words about the weather. Seeing the poppies changed all that though so I now know that he was born in 1936 and he remembered when where we were standing or sitting was underwater a lot of the time because it was a series of islands. He remembered the bombs falling on Poole, just as they fell on towns and cities all over Europe. He remembered three older brothers who went to war and didn’t come home. Two were in the Navy, one in the Air Force. He remembered the flying boats, which are a passion of mine because for a while they were the only air link between England and the rest of the world. He pointed out the parts of the sea where they once landed and told me about the old gas works. Then he smiled at me, said it had been nice having a bit of a chat and got on his bike and rode away.
Oh Dear Lord, if you are listening, please can I be like that when I’m eighty-eight? But there’s the story behind those poppies and memories I’m going to treasure and weave into my stories because they shouldn’t be forgotten. And nor should it be forgotten that we live in a beautiful world, and that there is beauty no matter what goes on around us. Once, that elderly gentleman was a small boy who played on bomb sites and poppies grew there too… As he said to me. It’s always good to look out for the flowers, isn’t it?
And you know what? He’s absolutely right.
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