Saturday, May 03, 2008

May Day + 1


Really a quite flowery scene today. The forget-me-nots are at their best and there are about a dozen spikes of bugle, now well distributed from their original 2004 beachhead by Purbeck Slab. The photo shows those next to the fox poo - beauty and the beast.

In the yellow department there are some creeping buttercup and dandelion flowers, though the latter shut towards evening.

The sorrel stems are beginning to up-wind rapidly now and sweet vernal grass continues to advance towards anthesis.

It is amazing how quickly small plants can be overpowered during this May growth surge and I like watching the cat’s-ear rosettes flattening the surrounding vegetation like greedy green wide-armed starfish.

As it is the beginning of May I made the first cut of Submespilus Assart South, initially with scissors, then by hand-grazing. It reminded me of a remark on lawns by Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature: “They are just a horizontal, mass-produced version of the wildernesses people visit to find peace and quiet and a sense of abstract nature.” He had previously written that “Wilderness can only exist as a reserve of unexploited capital.” Thus a lawn, as a kind of Mortonian wilderness, is a reserve of unexploited capital as the developers who are building houses on the lawns in people’s large back gardens have realised.

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