My life in... flowers

Our time in Texas didn't get mentioned in my previous post. North Texas does have trees, of course, but it's not big tree country. It used to be prairie. There is grass, and cacti, and flowers. Even the cacti have flowers.

Transplanting myself from cool damp British woodlands to hot dry Texas prairies meant learning a whole new wildflower vocabulary. Instead of Cowslips and Ragged Robin, there was Turk's Cap and Indian Blanket. In the spring, you didn't go to take photos in the bluebell woods, but among fields of bluebonnets.

English bluebell woods

Texas bluebonnets

So much of the original prairie has gone now, that there is a strong movement towards preserving what is left, and planting native species. We visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Centre in Austin, which is stunning - lovely buildings merging beautifully with the surrounding scenery. And I had a go at cultivating my own patch of native flowers in the backyard.

Even when you don't think you're a nature expert, it is disconcerting to move to a place where all the flowers are unfamiliar.

As a kid, I remember sitting on the school field making daisy chains and seeing how far we could shoot plaintain flowers.

Snapdragon flowers could be pinched to open and shut like little mouths, and of course my friends and I had several tries at making rose petal perfume, always resulting in a foul-smelling sludge.

All these small interactions build up a background level of familiarity, which is suddenly lost when you move to a different country. The good thing is that even the most common plants and animals become interesting, because they are new. We were enamoured by possums (regarded as a nuisance) and Graham was desperate to see a rattlesnake, which many Texans will kill if possible.

Then, when you move home, the familiar here seems exciting as well. We went for a walk during our first summer back in the UK, and it felt like hiking through a jungle! I had forgotten just how enthusiastically everything grows in the short summer season, fuelled by plenty of rain.

A British jungle!

I feel like I should be writing something more profound, but surely this is enough: Flowers are beautiful. I'm so glad we live in a world with so many kinds of flowers.

Purple coneflower, Texas

Comments

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions. The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?" This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them. Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone. That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of. Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died. And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was. His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...

Back on the Portway: Smalley and Morley

I didn't by any means feel I had fully explored the Erewash Valley, but I had completed my planned routes and got some idea of the transport, industry, and general geography of the area. It was time to return to the Portway. There are lots of -leys around here. Smalley, Morley, Mapperley, Stanley, Horsley. The suffix means "woodland clearing", and although there are not many woods around any more, it doesn't take much imagination to think of little villages among the trees. I started in Dale Abbey (or should that be Daley Abbley?) where the monastery once dominated the surrounding area. I've been to Dale Abbey several times but never actually walked through the village before. There is a neatly trimmed pub, an old chapel, now a church known as The Gateway, and a house with an odd lumpy corner which I realised must be part of the ruined abbey. A field path led me up to the main Derby-Ilkeston road. I crossed it and followed a couple of horses along a single-track l...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog