On wild flowers

I've had a migraine today all day and boy does it hurt. However lying in the dark with an eye mask can only be endured for so long and thus as it is twilighting outside and the blinds and curtains are closed, the lights not switched on and my laptop screen darkened I feel I must write something or explode. The latter would be very messy and hard for the police to explain, devastating for Andrew and just too tempting for Maggie to eat (boke!), so here I am teeth gritted, plodding onwards.

Lying here today I was thinking about roundabouts and public space gardening to keep myself sane(ish) so here I shall share....

French roundabouts make me happy. That sounds very sad but it is true. The vast majority are simply beautiful, and what is so great about it is the fun and community spirit that goes into it.Many of them have art done my school kids in them or really huge fun sculptures from wood. I only have a couple of photos here - one of wild flowers which are everywhere along the sides of the roads and intersections (fabulous idea!) and one of beautiful grasses etc but there were so many more (it's just a little hard to take photos out the window of the car whilst going round the roundabout and trying to be a good navigator). Some of them even had bee hives in them - bee hives! Genius.

I adore wild flowers and did do some guerrilla gardening last year when we moved into this new house. I quickly had an accomplice on line who was doing the same thing in a different country :) I was Ms W, she Ms J and she knows who she is *wink wink*. She even helped me when I ran out of seeds! But sadly and this is really very sad indeed... the area I chose to scatter my hopes of happiness also turned out to be the area which the water and gas people dug up (more than once) and thus not one of my seeds came to anything. I have more though for this year coming! I just thought whilst laying here, that it would be such a joy to guerrilla garden roadsides and make them stunning little points of beauty for people's long travels ummmm, these photos have cemented that idea.

I have only seen 3 bees this past summer, a good few wasps and about 5 ladybirds (Andrew saw his first of the year yesterday!) and 2 varieties of butterfly, one of which was the cabbage white (ggrrr, no broccoli for us this year). I think local indigenous wild flowers - planted on that bit of ugly waste land you have near your house, could well be a good idea, not just for the beauty and pleasure but also for the insects. eh? Enough with the sculptures and loads of money spent on silly bedding plants by our councils - wild is the future! Just a though from an addled and pain filled brain....
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