Sunday, June 29, 2008

creeping, fat gulls, cool dog














There are, according to Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora, nine wild flowers called locally "Creeping Jenny" . Here is the one which I know best. It is a wild flower but is also cultivated as ground cover to deter other more intrusive plants. That is one of its purposes in a difficult patch in our garden, but we alway look forward to its flowering, at this time of year, and its energetic way of speading its favours. For the sake of precision its latin name is Lysimachia nummularia. Apart from Creeping Jenny, its other widely employed common name is Moneywort. As a medicinal herb its most common use is to reduce bleeding.

As we queue for passport control at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, we see three fat seagulls wandering among the slow moving wheels of cars. Someone has been feeding them from a car window. They show no fear of the wheels; if they were big enough, they would kick the cars out of the way. Seagulls look better when they are flyimg.

In the closed train, which carries cars in the tunnel under the English Channel, we see that a woman is making her labrador comfortable in the rear compartment of her shooting brake in preparation for the 35 minute journey. Not only does the dog have a bowl of water, but an electric fan, powered from the dashboard.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm always learning something new from you, in such an interesting way, like this Creeping Jenny that I inherited in this garden. I wish you were right though about its keeping weeds out.

Dave King said...

Lovely image. Fascinating info.

Unknown said...

I meant that it keeps weeds out, only in the sense that plants like this, sometimes referred to as "ground cover", can, in the right conditions, hold off other less desirable plants, by occupying the space at their expense. Someone in the neighbourhood recently grubbed up a mass of Lesser Celandine. In its absence all sorts of unwanted grasses and the like have appeared.
Although I do like the idea of a plant, benign to gardeners, which takes aggressive action against such intruders as ground elder, mare's tail and wood sorrel. I wonder if there are any?

Thanks for calling, Dave.