An ambition realised!
A bit of flower buying at the end of my tour of New Covent Garden Market
I have always wanted to visit the Covent Garden flower market. I’ve heard of people going there to buy wedding flowers or even large house plants but have never been. So when I was making the Plant Tattoo episode with two florists and Hannah offered to show me around - I was very very excited. She kept her promise and this week she gave me a tour. She was kind, we met at 6.30am, not 4.30am, which is when the florists start arriving.
It is amazing, everywhere you look there are buckets of flowers of every type and colour. Masses of dahlias, hydrangeas, cosmos, buckets full of greenery; ivy, jasmine, eucalyptus. Then the sundries; row upon row of ribbons of every colour imaginable, stretching floor to ceiling. The cafe may have been shut but getting back onto the tube with a bunch of cafe au lait dahlias, in the midst of the early morning commuters made up for it! You’ll be able to hear this Offshoot episode on the 1st September but you can take a look at her website here.
One of the best bits of this podcasting world is the people, like Hannah, that I am meeting along the way. I have said before in this blog that the stories come from all kinds of places. As I start to research series 2, I am beginning to work on stories sent in by listeners which is a very exciting development. One incredible story sent to me, that I have just finished reading, involves a diary written by a great grandmother, plant hunters in China and a rockery. I hope in the future I might be able to share more of this wonderful history but if you have a plant story that you would like me to look into or just want to share, do email me sally@ourplantstories.com.
An update on the reading list. I mentioned in the last blog that the books I have recently read - ‘Up Here’ - essays from the Arctic Circle and ‘This book is a plant’ - essays to change the way we see plants, had a common thread. In the latter there is a wonderful essay by Rebecca Tamas entitled ‘Strange Soil’. “Despite the reliance of all living things on soil, we don’t know much about it…..for all its value, soil does not have the glamour of other types of non-human spaces or beings - it is not a dramatic ‘charismatic megafauna’, like a lion roaring on the plain, or an adorable panda, or a heart-warming pet. Soil is a space that is seemingly so far from human experience, so strange, so other - its tiny networks of organisms in the dark more like an alien planet than a familiar world - that it is easy to ignore it altogether, despite our lives relying on it entirely. She fears that we are “not telling stories of the soil”….and therefore “we have little passion for it, and therefore little energy to protect it.”
Barry Lopez in Up North also writes about soil. “In our journey north we would notice significant changes in the soil under our feet. Soil is a living system, a combination of dirt (particles of sand, clay and silt) decaying and processed organic matter. It is created by erosion, fracture and the secretion of organic acids; by animals and plants like beetles (saprophages) and mushrooms (saprophytes) that break down dead matter; and by the excretions of earthworms. It draws in oxygen like an animal, through myriad tunnels built by ants, rodents and worms. And it is inhabited throughout by hundreds of creatures - nematodes, mites, springtails, and soil bacteria and fungi. Decomposition in the Arctic is exceedingly slow…..if we kept walking, we would eventually stand in a country without the earthworm or the carrion beetle, a place were earth and decay are almost unknown, on the lifeless gravels of the polar desert.”
Reading these two essays ignited my interest in soil and I knew that I already had a book on my shelves, as yet unread, entitled: ‘Good Soil’ by Tina Raman, Ewa-Marie Rundquist and Justine Lagache. It promises expertise on every aspect of your soil, from chemistry and biology to history and philosophy with above all masses of inspiration. So this is now the book by my bed!