Turning a conker in my hands I walk my usual loop of Edgbaston in twilight drizzle, passing by the regulars who walk the neighbourhood at the same time as me each evening. Dressed in trousers and coats rather than shorts and t-shirts, the seasons are changing but the ritual remains the same. Deep in the bellies of the Georgian mansions, lights illuminate front rooms and hallways, making the grand homes up long driveways and behind tall gates look ever so domestic and inviting.
I love how different cultures and languages describe the physical world and seasons. In Japanese, there’s komorebi to describe the phenomenon of light flickering through trees, and in Polish there’s a phrase to describe a particularly beautiful autumn – złota jesień – which translates as ‘golden autumn’.
My fascination with house plants continues. I love epiphytic cacti and so I am currently rooting some cuttings I bought on eBay for the equivalent of a pot of tea and a piece of cake in a café – some rhipsalis paradoxa and lepismium bolivianum. They are hanging out growing roots in a jam jar alongside a young (already rooted) selenicereus chrysocardium I am hoping will grow big and strong come spring. I just love these plants, they have such strange shaped foliage and really beautiful flowers if you’re lucky enough to get them to bloom, and they do well in bright, indirect light – which is just as well as that’s about all I can offer them in winter!
I’m writing this to pledge to myself that there will be no more plants – or cuttings – until at least the spring though. The light is fading fast now that October is here, and I don’t want to overstretch myself given that space is limited and I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to plants. I am really enjoying growing things from cuttings and small starter plants, it’s a cheap way to get in to house plants and it’s really rewarding to watch roots grow and new leaves emerge over time. Just this week my sansevieria masoniana has put out a new pup which is unfurling daily, much to my delight. It’s like watching paint dry in terms of action, but I find it strangely mesmerising.
Today I celebrate fifteen years of veganism. I turned vegan in the autumn of 2005 when I was nineteen and in my second year at university. Before turning vegan I ate a normal diet including meat, fish and dairy, and I didn’t pay too much attention to the non-food items I used either, other than to buy cruelty free cosmetics. The only thing I didn’t eat was beef which I stopped eating in the mid 1990s as a result of the BSE / CJD crisis in the UK. It was my decision to stop eating beef when I was ten, and I made that decision because I was so horrified by what I was seeing in the news and the knowledge that BSE was caused by feeding cows – herbivores – low quality food containing the remains of other animals. I was probably more aware of the BSE and CJD crisis than most children and teenagers would have been at the time because, after leaving midwifery in the late 1990s, my mum worked as a nurse and provided nursing home care for a young woman just a few years older than my brother and sister were who was dying from CJD. Knowing what I did, giving up beef was easy.
Photos of the California / Oregon / Washington state wildfires and the surreal orange skies, as if 2020 didn’t feel enough like a horror film. The lead image is particularly powerful. This year started with fire, and looks like it will end with it too. I really feel for the affected communities and hope that the fires can be extinguished as soon as possible.
I have been reading a lot about botany and mycology this month, and found this article on Victorians, botany and pteridomania – obsessive fern hunting and collecting – interesting:
Botany was, after all, one of the few avenues open to women who wanted to experience adventure for themselves; it was popular and widespread enough to be deemed an acceptable outdoors activity for the ladies. Indeed, women could even engage into fern hunting unchaperoned, since it was considered an entirely wholesome, healthy, and moral activity.
