CHERTSEY

BOATS, BRIDGES, BOILERS ... IF IT'S GOT RIVETS, I'M RIVETTED
... feminist, atheist, autistic academic and historic narrowboater ...
Likes snooker, beer, tea, rivets and solitude, and is strangely fascinated by the cinema organ.
And there might be something about railways.
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Monday 2 July 2012

Cabintop flowers

When Sebastian and Izzi visited they brought me a lovely present - a Harveys of Lewes jug for putting flowers on the cabintop. Derided by some as a soft southern habit, this is nonetheless a tradition (or not) that I rather like. I filled it up with flowers from the yard before we left, and most mornings picked one or two new specimens from where we were moored - never too many; never enough to notice they were missing (and none, strangely, in Birmingham). I didn't pick the foxglove; it was a victim of veg pledge strimming. It was quite frustrating boating past profuse displays of gorgeous flowers, only to find none where we tied up.

The longest lasting were a blue flower, looking somewhat like a thistle or a cornflower, but with different leaves from either (if you enlarge the photo you can see one on the right hand side), that  collected from the bottom of the drive - fifteen days later I brought one of them back again. The pink hogweed (carefully picked) did well too, as did, to my surprise, the campion. The biggest failure, not even lasting half a day, was elderflower. On the whole it taught me that whilst wild flowers may not last if you pick them and bring them indoors, outdoors most seem to do very well.


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