I’ve been noticing on my bike travels (if going to the shop and back to buy a paper counts as ‘travels’ in these restricted times) a patch of bright red flowers blooming by the side of the road, an unusual sight at this time of year. One of those sights that I’ve been meaning to stop and investigate, one of these days, but never quite having the time on the way out, and then forgetting all about it on the way back. So long have they been blooming, indeed, that I began to wonder if they were real at all – sometimes people leave wreaths at special spots by the river, and sometimes they are artificial ones.
Anyway, yesterday I finally took the time to check it out and found they were real, but they weren’t wildflowers – someone had fly tipped the contents of their summer hanging baskets by the side of the road and there were pelargoniums and a few lobelias still valiantly blooming away, in some cases upside down.
As flytipping goes, it’s not the worst I’ve seen, nor is it the most useful (I’m still using the plant modules I found dumped in the river many moons ago) , nor even the most bizarre, which has to go to the pair of crutches I saw last month (or perhaps the full-sized vending machine that cropped up in the same layby a couple of years ago)
But even garden waste is still flytipping and it’s still annoying that people just dump stuff on the side of the road – one of the worst things about cycling is that you can’t help but notice the flytipping and litter pretty much everywhere you go. And besides, there was something very poignant about these poor discarded plants, still doing their thing unregarded by the side of the road.
Soft hearted a gardener as I am, I felt I did very well not to try and rescue them for another season (I have to admit, I did consider it) – and given that we woke to snow this morning, I’m guessing that they’ll have flowered their last by the time I next go past.
Although if they are still going when I next see them, I’ll be hard pressed not to scoop at least some of them up and take them home …