Spreading his seed upon the ground

[hirez]

Gug.

Nice out, isn't it? Could do with a drop of rain,mind; my courgettes are in a right old state.

On Saturday I was to be found in a field, casting my seed hither and yon. Fortunately for all concerned, it was from a plastic tub containing a variety of wild flowers supplied by the council.

(Which is all remarkably daft when you think about it, but that's what a well-meant but startlingly badly executed 'commitment to the environment' gets you. It all began with the Cheltenham Floods the other year. One of the alleged 'problem areas' was a corner of Prestbury where there is a brook that once in a while overflows its banks. This would be fine had the relevant bit of flood-plain not been covered in Executive Homes for Executives to park their Executive Cars outside. Since Executive Homes are far more important that some fields that had been fields for so long that the ridge-and-furrow was still obvious, it was decided to run a thumping great tunnel across several fields and a couple of roads at £ye-gods-how-much?

They made an epic bugger of the job, all the while sending Men to bang on about 'mitigating environmental impact'. Then the next week sending different men to cut down the wrong trees. The final emanation of 'we know better' has been to send a bag of wild flower seeds for people to scatter on the ground that they turned upside-down (so there is a bloody great streak of compacted clay across the fields which is going to look a bit bald for the next couple of seasons and no amount of seed-scattering is going to fix that. You useless tossers.) because of course letting the local flora get on with the job isn't properly 'environmentally aware')

I may have written rude words with my tub of wildflower seeds. We shall find out next summer.

Comments

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I do hope you did write rude words that flourish and you can provide photographic proof for me to chortle over next year :-)

[miss_squiddy]

Well done that man. I hope they flower nice and clearly. :)

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Floral swearing, the rude-kid arm of the Guerilla Gardening movement.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

If you're going to tag up, at least do it in something hardy and suited to claggy soil.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Have you ever considered planting up those colourblindness tests ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That is a splendidly antagonistic idea. Yes.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

This conjured all sorts of hilarious images that I will keep to myself, thank you very much.

[the_axel]

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

Was that where the stream goes under the B4632, near the junction of Mill Lane - on this map (http://g.co/maps/jaahx)? (ignore the A, that was as close as Google could get).

I noticed they'd diverted the course of the stream fairly drastically when I was last there. I was casing the joint for a bit of guerrilla tree planting. The new stream cuts off a corner of that field...I see a nice little copse in that corner in a few years.

Of course, under the new plans for the Bishop's Cleeve-Cheltenham-Churchdown-Gloucester conurbation, that whole area is proposed for yet more executive homes - and the new Cheltenham Northern Relief Road, which seems to be cunningly designed to funnel maximum traffic up the B4632 to Winchcombe (which presumably will then require its own relief road). So whether my copse will ever reach maturity is a moot point.

The other stream visible in the map - the one that mysteriously vanishes under the A - actually goes all the way up the High Street, Noverton Lane, and on up the hill. It's been steadily encased in a tunnel over the years. And every few winters it contrives to burst out at some point. I remember years when that little stream would turn into a raging torrent, and push the road surface aside as if it was so much soggy cardboard. Then the council would come along with yet more concrete and entomb it again.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the place.

If there's more traffic up that road, perhaps it will start sliding down the escarpment towards Bishop's Cleeve again.

[bmlg.livejournal.com]

This item's is rather mired in bureaucratese, but perhaps cheering? Locally there's a program to restore Bowker Creek (a name that always makes me start humming 'collier lads for evermore') from its long burial in culverts and ditches to an actual watercourse.
http://www.bowkercreekinitiative.ca/index.htm

I applaud your wildflower wallposter movement. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Bowker Creek (a name that always makes me start humming 'collier lads for evermore')

Damn you. Me too, now.