Fireweed*

By Sandra Gibson
Photographs by Geoff Edwards

Summer Fantasy and Beyond

June 2014

During the summer season the media offer us the experience of a spacious and gracious life outdoors. I am struck by a magazine photograph of garden chairs so elegant they seem like sculpture, so fragile you wouldn’t risk sitting on them and so expensive they need a security guard. These chairs have nothing to do with functionality or comfort; nothing to do with the real world. They belong to a scenario of floral frocks perching weightlessly on hammocks and languid young men sipping mint juleps. They belong to a fantasy of what summer ‘should’ be. So insubstantial that they scarcely cast a shadow, they also reflect our anxiety about the brevity of summer light.

But we don’t need these manufactured fantasies whose purpose is to persuade us to spend money. Summer is amazing in its own right without the benefit of bunting, glamping, fire pits and weather resistant chaise longues. The tiniest back garden is brimming with possibility and life and you don’t need to be a gardener to enjoy it. Fill it with low maintenance plants (perennial geraniums, lavender, rosemary, bamboo, hydrangea and lobelia don’t seem to attract slugs or aphids), surround it with a mixed hedge (hawthorn, privet, honeysuckle, copper beech, pyracantha, ivy) and you will have birds in the housing queue and insects busy all day long.

There are always cats in summer gardens, drowsing on the warm flags or watching in the long grasses. Black Cat brings me unwelcome gifts: a limp mouse on my bare toes, the brightness bitten out of its eyes; an iridescent starling whose will to life is still imprinted in my palms; a dead rat still twitching on the kitchen floor. In the evenings I listen to the blackbird broadcasting its radiant song from the top of the telegraph pole and it is so poignantly beautiful, so summer-full, that I forget that this is a song about territorial rights. I know it is though; I know that this is not Disneyland. Yet the bird song is so wonderful too.

To read other Fireweed columns click here

*Also known as Rose Bay Willow Herb, the prolific wild flower called Fireweed, five feet tall with spikes of magenta flowers, cheers the hearts of those whose cityscape has become a bomb site or whose buildings have been cleared by machine. The dormant seeds spring to life after destructive events such as forest or man-made fires, hence the name, Fireweed. This occasional column will celebrate the persistence of wildlife in urban conditions.

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