Outdoors
| Jul 2010 If you think of it, our country - the village streets as well as the hedges and fellsides - must teem continuously with seeds, from April to October. As we walk along a pavement or a path, every surface must be drifted over, however briefly, with thousands of the little wizened motes of life. Where a wall bounds a yard, a dandelion is leafing and will soon be flowering. So a single seed must have been carried here on its ’ parachute’ of downy filaments and lodged in the merest crevice, with only a smattering of grit to lodge in, where it waited for moisture and warmth. A little shock of spleenwort sprouts from the wall on the south side of Boon Walks Path. Spores from the bigger plants, like bunches of lizards’ tails, a few yards along must have landed on. their tiny foothold are now (mid June) trying to survive the many weeks of scanty rainfall. On the east wall of Miss Olive’ s garden, next to Shoemaker’ s Cottage, brilliant bunches of campanula glow luminous purple, festooning the Neddy Hill road-sign. Ten years ago there was one bunch - now there are four. Most of the seeds will blow away to nothing. A few lodged between the limestone blocks, survived to root, then shoot, and gladden us with these bouquets of colour. How do they do it, these dried-up, brown and black particles, scattered onto the world by flowers and leaves, looking as dead as pepper in a grinder? Being tiny must be a help, letting them hide in crannies where feet can’ t crush them or birds’ beaks gobble them up. And they have hard husks round tender kernels, and some have little hooks or spikes to catch on the coats of animals and get carried away from congested places to roomier ones. Most of the time they must be drifting and sifting, whisking over stones, catching on ledges, dropping into earth made hospitable by moisture. Most of the seeds must go to waste, or else we would be buried alive in matted wilderness. Think of the clusters that hang from ash-tree branches in the autumn, like roosting bats. If all those seeds rooted and sprang and matured, Cumbria would be one jungle of grey boles. The single Scots pine at the top of Boon Walks Path where it turns north along the old orchard has dropped its cones year after year. Not one seed from not one cone has rooted to produce a sapling. The apple tree in the orchard rains down its yellow fruit (smaller each season) and none of them ever gives rise to a little tree. I can’ t help wishing good luck to everything that grows (even the bindweed). I know that most of the seeds are doomed (human as well as those of other animals and plants). It’ s still good to think that more or less invisibly, with no noise, the trillions of tiny life-forms are blowing round our feet and through our air-space and that enough of them will make it through to become next year’ s wave of buttercup and campanula, nettle and thistle, herb-Robert and dandelion, sycamore and birch. |
