Reading up on white campion while drinking a mug of tea, I discovered that it is diecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants, so I may or may not get seed from my plant in the corner of the back garden. I also learnt that it is moth pollinated. Gardening for bees is all the rage nowadays, and people have planted buddleia for the butterflies for a long time, but you don't hear much support for moths. I suppose they don't do themselves any favours by fluttering around lights at night, and most of them are dingy shades of brown, while clothes moths and wax moths get the moth tribe a bad name (though maybe not, given that our love affair with the butterfly survives the cabbage white). When I was a child we had a French au pair at one stage, who was afraid of moths, so I became afraid of moths as well. I have got over that now, but still don't like them as much as I like beetles, or spiders.
Following on from my grumbles about how road verges seem to get mown before the wild flowers can set seed, I got an e-mail update today from the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife, and saw that they are running a campaign to improve the management of road verges. Apparently there are 238,000 hectares of road verge in Great Britain. That seems quite a lot to me. The Essex Wildlife Trust manages reserves totalling around 2,900 hectares, and it is one of the largest of the UK's 47 wildlife trusts (OK, the website doesn't say whether 'largest' is with reference to area under management, or membership). Managing 238,000 hectares in ways that are helpful for wildlife ought to make a difference in the national scheme of things.
With great self discipline I stuck to my plan of weeding the island bed and mulching it with mushroom compost, as a prelude to planting up the gaps. It was tempting first thing to wander around pulling out goose grass from the other borders, but I really should finish one project before moving on to the next, or the weeding I did yesterday will only need doing again in another few weeks. The mushroom compost has got quite wet, sitting in plastic sacks on the back of the truck through the past couple of months of rain, and smells about as you would expect.
The Rosa glauca that I planted last year has finally started throwing strong new shoots from the base, after sitting there doing nothing, not dying but not growing, ever since it went in. It used to be known as Rosa rubrifolia, which is worth knowing in case you find it mentioned in an old gardening book, or are shopping for one at a nursery run by somebody resistant to new plant names. It has greyish-purple leaves ('leaden foliage' is the usual description), small pink flowers and red hips in the autumn, and is a delightful thing, well grown. It will not tolerate semi-shade and root competition from a large hedge, to judge by my previous failures at growing it.
Meanwhile, I gathered that The Archers is to have more dramatic and darker plot lines. I am still not listening since the BBC threw Nigel Pargetter off the roof, and even the Systems Administrator, who was brought up on The Archers, has given up, saying that the whole thing has just got too silly and miserable. Although I don't listen I have gathered the gist of what's going on, and I'd have thought that clocking up a fatal freak accident, an attack that left somebody in a coma, a (not fatal) heart attack, and an outbreak of farm-bourne food poisoning that left a child seriously ill in hospital was quite enough drama and darkness to be going on with in fifteen months. Life doesn't go on at that pace in North Essex. Apparently the characters need dramatic arcs, and to be in jeopardy so that we sympathise with them. Perhaps that is what Cardunculus needs in order to go viral. Instead of pootling on about wild flowers, and manure, and roses, and toads, and mouldy cheese, and cats, and the hard seats and eccentric sense of timing at the Colchester folk club, and chickens, and the pointlessness of Damien Hirst in the mind of anyone sentient, I need to end each post with a cliff-hanger. The lawn tractor did refuse to start this afternoon, and the SA feared that there might be a problem with the electrics as well as the fuel system, and I thought that might do. Will the SA be able to mend the electrics? Or be electrocuted trying? Will this downshifted nouveau pauvre couple be able to afford a new lawn tractor? Dum de dum de dum de dum. But then the SA said that the electrics were fine, it was just that the engine won't start unless the parking brake is on, and it wasn't. Can the SA fix the obstruction in the fuel system? Er, yes, probably.
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