Death of a Sunflower

What a brilliant beginning to my residency; on Sunday, I broke the stem of a sunflower – a little like breaking its back – and then tore it out of the ground. It was dead, but it was still living, really – still very beautiful, if dry and (as I found out later) stinking. I put cornflowers in my lapel. I was introduced to camomile in its natural state, as opposed to the strange, limp stuff in a teabag. Scarlet will tell you, I was rubbing my hands all over it because it smelled so beautiful.

Scarlett is the person I’m working with on this residency. She wears pink and is fabulous. Currently she is planting according to the moon. I will provide details of this late. In the mean time, observe:

Our boots. Mine speckled, hers porcine.

Scarlett herself – the least camera shy person I’ve met. See how naturally she explains what’s going on? The tee-pee-like construction is for plants to climb. I know there are pee – sorry, pea – shoots beneath it, which had sprung up by my last visit. This is both good and bad: it means it’s warmer than it should be so they are growing faster, but if we have a particularly bad winter they’ll freeze to death.

I think the blur adds to the charm. The arrangement of the chairs suggests there is a potted-plant appreciation society at the allotment. There isn’t. But there are all sorts of odd things; A single pink sandal was uncovered when Scarlet and I were digging up weeds, and there is a fox named Cheeky who has a penchant for leather gloves.

And this is roughly what one part of the allotment looks like. The tall plant against the fence in the centre of the picture is the sunflower before we uprooted it. I can’t help but think the heavy, shrivelled heads are erotically charged. Beyond that is a nice house with what looks like a conservatory. Scarlet and I were having a conversation about communal areas and how the ethos of the allotment is so different to the rest of Hampstead. I was saying that as I walked from the station I was aware of how conspicuous I was; I don’t look like I come from there, though I sound as if I do.

Gary Younge, in his first book ‘No Place Like Home’ discusses something similar – the experience of ‘looking local, but sounding foreign’ in the US and ‘looking foreign, but sounding local’ in the UK. We talked about the areas we grew up in and the areas we moved to; we talked about racial demographics in Sutton in the 1970s; we talked about appearances – the tendency for Englishers to dress in monotone, when English wild flowers – such as the cornflower I had in my lapel – are so vibrant.

Colour as home. Colour to signify a place. The obvious colour of the allotment is green, but I’ve found so far that it serves as an effective backdrop to the intense colours of the plants. And it seperates us from everything else; you go from a tarmac road to grass paths, and ‘Heavy Plant Crossings’, to nothing but plants. Besides the odd helicopter, it’s nearly silent too and I have a whole other post on what that does to conversation…