Events this year have meant the councils in these parts have not been doing their usual trick of spraying weed-killing glyphosate in each and every nook and cranny so a thousand flowers have bloomed, to quote old Mao, mostly in the gutters and pavements of the town and neighbourhood. It's been one of the few benefits of the 'madness of 2020'. These little beauties are really tiny and a lifetime first for me, Anagallis arvensis or Scarlet Pimpernel in a gutter on Strathcona Avenue. I know they're orange; it seems they didn't have a word for that colour, cf pink , so scarlet they became for want of a better word. WikiP tells me they are considered a weed, hmmph, and also that the flowers only open in sunshine hence another name of Poor man's weather-glass and there's also a blue scarlet pimpernel go figure.
Though there cannot be more than a light coating of dusty, wind-blown, useless soil in the gutter it is enough to support a surprising array of species which Authorities kill off in the name of tidiness. This is what we are missing by this stupidity.
