The bloom of death

¡No te dejes morir lentamente!

¡No te impidas de ser feliz!

Last year we bought a couple of pots of House Leeks or Sempervivum as you may know them. I just  left them to do their thing didn't even pot them on; you can still see the price £3.99 ...  and so as the year slowly spun into summer a majestic phallic obscenity arose with these blooms on top. I can't (and don't) claim any credit for this, I'm very hands off and let things die of their own free will as I'm told they will after blooming, an orgy of monocarpic delight.

The weekend in black and white (like death and taxes) will be with us sooner or later here.

Red bike and blue

Unwanted bikes make for colourful flower displays (eventually) or so says Hunstanton. I'm supposed to be stuck in a house a hundred and more miles away so my view rightly doesn't count for much.

Say it with flowers

Florists across the country have been trying to cash in on Mothering Sunday (or Mother's Day as we call it here to confuse our American friends, I doubt if many know why it is even a thing on the calendar but I digress) possibly their last opportunity to make a bit of money for some time (except maybe for funerals though even they will no doubt be banned if the ordure really hits the fan). These polyanthus primula "Silver Lace" were at the Plant Pot on Greenwood Avenue. 

The advice from our increasingly floundering Premier is not to visit mama today, indeed aged maters and paters should both be locked up tight and not allowed out (smothering Sunday, perhaps?) ... since I've been a poor orphan these many years it's not really an issue.

Cardoon Time

Out and about on Newland Avenue this afternoon and came across this splendid beast growing in a raised bed. It's a cardoon or globe artichoke and most definitely not your standard Council plant. I'm told they are edible or rather the inner bits of the stalk can be stewed up and consumed au gratin should you choose. Anyhow bees love them.

Margot took this picture

Makin' Pumpkins

I'm new to pumpkins, a bit of a pumpkin virgin, as it were  ... it was Margot's idea to grow some this year, it'll be a fun, she said, a bit of a laugh ... anyway through the cold of May nothing grew then in June a few leaves then turn July and  whoosh they filled the little plastic green house ... then tendrils? nobody told me about tendrils, nor the hairy almost spiky stems. Then the flower buds which were numerous but just sat there until yesterday when they turned a weird yellow then this morning I go down to find these ridiculous beauties ... but I read these are male flowers and these big bad boys need a female flower in order that things can progress, the technical term is 'fruit set' although you may call it something else ...  I'm told that the female flowers will definitely be along later but they only open early morning and close in the afternoon (bit like some shops I know) ... and hand pollination may be needed if the insects can't manage an early morning rendezvous ... and there, as it were, will go my pumpkin virginity.

The Beauty of Snuff Mill Lane

Picture by Margot K Juby

Hogweed is such a crude name for this little gem of an umbellifer. An alternative of cow parsnip is not really a whole lot better. How about Heracleum sphondylium (Heraclean vertebrate??? Linnaeus has a lot to answer for) does that sound grander? Or (new to me) Eltroot? As it's seemingly de rigueur these days to bring in the Bard at any opportunity I'll just ask what's in a name? ... and move on, quickly.

Snuff Mill Lane whence came this beauty is doing that thing it does in June when it rains lots and is warmish (OK cool ~14C) and muggy. Hay fever sufferers should probably avoid this place for a while. You'll have to imagine, if you can, the sound that accompanies you in this place with dozens of singing birds all competing for my one good ear... It can only be a matter of time before someone comes and strims the whole lot down in the name of tidiness... 

And it pays to keep your wits about you as you never know what you might come across down this lane.

The weekend in Black and White will be blooming here, hopefully.

A kind of magic

As you go up Newland Avenue (up meaning Northwards) you pass under a rail bridge and maybe pay little heed to the patch of land just to your side. It is hidden behind some protective fencing and only measures a few square feet. It used to be a bit of a problem with litter and "stuff" accumulating there, really just an ugly nuisance; but then some locals took it in hand and transformed it into a teeny magical garden where not everything is as it appears... So a big well done and many thanks to the folks who did this.

Pink Kisses

Which came first the flower or the colour? These are pinks (Dianthus) and have been called pinks since day one or, at least, since the Dutch brought them over; now it seems the colour came from the flower that is to say things were "pink-coloured" eventually this became simply pink... so what word did we use for pink before we had pink? It seems we used 'incarnation' and 'incarnate' (flesh-coloured; you can see a need for a slightly less gruesome word and without religious and other connotations). So from incarnation you might think it is but a very short step to carnation which as you know is also a dianthus or pink but this etymology is said to be confused, or so I read (the whole damn thing is confusing and I wish I hadn't started out on this nonsense), and could come from coronation, the edges of the flowers looking like a crown.  
Still and more, the word pink became a term for excellence ... so these could be said to be the very pink of pink pinks ... and then, of course there's pinkos for those of a not quite red, slightly left of centre  persuasion (persuasion itself is becoming dated notion), pink elephants can, of course, be on parade and pinkie (again from the Dutch) ... and then there's the verb, to pink, meaning to pierce which is totally unrelated and which could give us pinked pinks ... and  I think I'll have a little lie down with a large pink gin.

Anyhow these are Dianthus Pink Kisses and you could buy a pretty pink potful for £3 from a big shop on Clough Road should you wish.

Today's monthly theme, as you might have guessed, is pink.

Sweet Williams

Picture by Margot K Juby

Round the corner from the Duke of Cumberland sits this quietly unassuming public house named officially as the  King William the Fourth; a mouthful for anyone so known universally as the King Billy. Now I've only just found that the William referred to here was the fourth, no-body remembers Billy IV. Everyone knows Will I (the Conqueror or Billy the Bastard, 1066 and all that, a good thing), Willy II (aka Rufus, died (murdered?) while hunting in the New Forest) and then our Glorious King William the Third ( the King Billy; the great deliverer, who gave us our freedom, religion and laws) but William the Fourth who he, when all the dust is settled? As Margot succinctly put it  "He's the Gordon Brown of Kings"; poor sod, forgotten by all save the sots of Cottingham. 

... and the fading flowers are, of course, Sweet Williams, not, as some north of the imaginary border, call them Stinking Billies (ragwort actually) and besides the Stinking Billy in that case was William, Duke of Cumberland (Butcher Cumberland to some who knew him well enough to suffer) and, as I say, he lives round the corner.

William is such a sweet name, dontcha think?

Under Threat

 

Ah so there's our old friend Mankind Under Threat squatting in the belated May sunshine all safe and sound now betwixt the City Treasury and the Guildhall. I wondered where he'd gone to. I suppose, technically, he's on public display but so far off any beaten track no visitor to Hull would come across him by accident. Unlike the old place in Queen's Gardens this site is hardly conducive to the contemplation of mankind being under threat. The threat to our friend here is clear: pointlessness and obscurity. He has already become a mere decoration. There are plans to secure this area with gates (the slim to non-existent terrorist threat to Councillors and council staff must be taken seriously ... and a quarter million pounds is the serious money that must be spent to take it seriously). Anyhow once the gates are built our caged friend will be even more secure and even more out of reach.

Honesty

Lunaria annua

Being the sort of gardener that likes to let things sort themselves out, (no point in fooling with Nature because, as someone once said, Nature cannot be fooled) I find a lot of these nice purple flowers cropping up in all sorts of places at this time of year. The well tempered cultivator might well call them weeds but I call them welcome additions to my small patch of land. You might not recognise the flowers but I'm pretty sure you'll have seen the transparent seed heads in floral displays. There's also a white variety and even a pinkish one but today, being the first of the month, is all about purple.

Honesty is the English name for this plant but other cultures have a more mercenary name, money plant, silver dollars, Judas coins and (my  favourite) La monnaie du pape being just a few choice alternatives. Botanists call it Lunaria annua despite it being a biennial ... whatever its name if you just leave it alone it'll settle in nicely, my kind of plant.

And honesty being best policy means that I must own that Margot Juby took these pictures.

Fritillaria imperialis

Or Crown Imperial Fritillary ... it's a native of Turkey, western Iran and Kashmir so I'm told. It doesn't seem to mind the grounds of Hull University that much.

Margot took this little beauty.

Emma and the Beast from the East

Well who would have guessed it a cold spell in winter? The media love this kind  of thing, the Met office warnings from a week ahead foretelling a (Yellow/red alert?) hell on earth, the Daily Express saying (as it always does) this is the end of the world as we know it. So we get the confrontation of "Storm Emma" with the "Beast from the East". And? Well here in Hull there's maybe an inch of snow if you are generous and yeah it's cold, colder than it's been all winter but then cold is what you get in winter. Meh!

Flor'ull clock

If the C of C can spend a small fortune on silly Hull puns then I'm making no apologies for this. The design of this years display is, of course the logo for the culture fest that you may have seen here or here and rightly ignored. Oh look, is that the time? must dash ....

Sweet Chestnut

Hull Council has been planting replacement trees in recent years and a favourite of whoever is in charge seems to be the Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa). At this time of the year it is in full (and I do mean full) bloom. The trees are covered in hundreds of spiky flowers. The bees love them. They do however have a peculiar but not unpleasant scent which some say smells like semen! I haven't noticed any fruits in the autumn as yet but with global warming no doubt folk will gathering up the nuts for roasting. Sweet chestnuts are supposed to be long living; up to 2 or 3,000 years, so these could be the Council's best investment to date. This plant is not any relative of the Horse Chestnut which I posted earlier this year; eating conkers is definitely not recommended.

Dealing with stuff

Here at the foot of the Queen Victoria statue are heaped flowers and balloons and toys and cardboard messages. It's part of that modern fashion for taking part in ceremonies or rites of remembrance and outpourings of sympathy and solidarity. I think I can date the start of this fashion at least in this country; 31 August 1997 or what we call in our house Princess Di Day. The weeks following that car crash were filled with outpourings of grief, giant heaps of flowers and dozens of books of condolences up and down the country (who read them?). I didn't know the woman, never met her but it seemed the whole country had lost a greatly loved family member; it was all totally surreal. So now with every natural disaster, road accident or passing terrorist attack (this one in Manchester the other week but it could be anywhere) we get this and more sometimes (Je suis Charlie was particularly grating). 

I have to say I prefer the old way of dealing with deaths and disasters; flags at half mast maybe, a few words of condemnation or commiseration, absolutely no interviews with survivors, family members, no coverage of police operations, no sensationalism and certainly no heaps of flowers, toys and so on and just move on. Deny your enemy the oxygen of publicity as Mrs Thatcher reportedly said, the bastards absolutely hate to be ignored or, as a columnist in the Guardian put it recently, "Publicity is terror’s “second wave”. Without publicity, terrorism is just dead bodies." But with 24 hour news coverage of everything they have to fill in the gaps with something even if it's only people putting flowers round Queen Victoria in Hull. I suppose I'll just have to deal with it.

Say it with flowers

At the entrance to the Uni the Botany Department shows it can grow a few plants.

Margot probably wants some credit for taking this; how hard can it be to push a camera button?

Ne'er cast a clout till May be out

No, not a political slogan, but advice on what to wear in England in spring time which can be notoriously fickle temperature wise. You may know May blossom  as hawthorn, maythorn, quickthorn, whitethorn or (my favourite if Wikipedia can be believed) motherdie but the name matters little when it's covering the whole countryside with luscious white blossom. The scent of this bush is particularly pungent and, some say, redolent of corpses which may be why it is considered bad luck to bring the blossom into your house. It looks much better outside any way.

Margot took the top shot. She prefers it in colour but it's not her blog.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The Florist

This was taken in December when it seems there was a market for wreaths of holly and mistletoe and other Yuletide paraphernalia; how long ago that seems now. Hollyhocks is on Princes Avenue and seems to be blooming.

Hung with bloom along the bough

Yes it's the annual A E Housman memorial post ...