The Path Ahead
Friday, 12 July
It’s become an obstacle course, my morning walk. All-natural impediments but the path is overrun with competing plant life.
Daucus carota that I wrote about recently still meanders across my way. Though the flower of the wild carrot has mostly turned to seed, she is no less striking in her dotage.
And a new cast of characters is grabbing the limelight.
Lithesome grasses and wild oats now bow over the path. Nettles, with their deceptively frothy flowers, lean in, causing me at times to raise my hands away from their sting as if a gun were at my back.
Brambles come at me from every angle, causing the occasional stumble or – worse – they grab me by the hair and yank me backwards. Still, I've been lucky. Wet mornings mean Wellington boots safeguard me to the knees and cool temperatures have my arms covered. As I discovered yesterday afternoon, when I went for a run more lightly clad and came home with gouged ankles and tingling forearms.
Birds now share the airwaves with bees who buzz around the blackberry flowers at face level, while underfoot the thick, tall grass, still being watered regularly by rain, conceals ruts and bumps left from the passage of tractors, quads (scourge of the countryside) and horse hoofs. It would be easy to sprain an ankle.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to look up and take in the bigger picture.
On the home stretch, in our very own field, orchard and garden, a host of this distinctive plant has come into flower:
Should you be thinking the russet flora might pleasingly offset the surrounding green in your life, think again. Rumex obtusifolius , otherwise known as dock weed, is an obstinate pest (rumex was the name that the Roman naturalist Pliny gave to sorrel and obtusifolius means obtuse-leaves, for their shape rather than their level of intelligence). Though the leaves are sorrel-like and edible, this invasive interloper has a taproot that descends all the way to Middle Earth. Each plant produces a gazillion seeds that can survive in the soil for up to 50 years. Before you know it, you've gone from nuclear family to metropolis.
They are a plague to organic farmers, who often comb the fields with a special tool to uproot them.
Alerted to this mischief-maker by our green guru Claire, we have been practising dock control for the last few months. Since we don't have the tool and there were too many to uproot anyway, we cut them at the base, thereby weakening next year's growth and limiting seed redistribution.
We certainly haven't got them all, but our population control measures have yielded some results...
...and yesterday garden maestro Florie, afraid the cut dock would start to seed our driveway, took the definitive step...
Last Sunday was the second round of the French legislative elections. The barrage républicain, whereby centrist and left-wing candidates in three-way races joined forces against the extreme right-wing Rassemblement National, was effective. Much to the relief of many of us, the RN did not win the majority that had been predicted.
Now the real chaos begins. Everyone is saying they've won and in a sense everyone has. The left got the biggest bloc in the National Assembly, but the right got a higher percentage of the vote. The RN is still the most solid party on the political landscape. Who should be anointed to form a government?
Watching politicians jockey for position reminds me of the plants crowding my morning walk. The path ahead looks just as prickly; the Rumex obtusifolius has only been partially and temporarily tamed.
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