Gone to seed

Photo: © Peter Jones

Around this time of year everything starts going to seed. In the boxes out front the kniphofia lifts a long, dry spike of seeds over the road. The stocks from the summer and the wallflowers that I left in from the spring to give cover have formed almost identical long fingers of crackling brown (they are both members of the Brassica family), each of them filled with tiny black and brown seed. The lovely purple pincushions of scabious flowers that fed the bees all summer have matured into lightweight brown husks, held out on long stems, looking like nothing so much as an old man’s hairy testicles.

In midsummer when the local girls nagged me for things to plant, I told them to pull the seedheads off the marigolds. They pushed them into the wet soil, so that a month ago green shoots sprouted round the edge of the boxes, and now the marigolds are the only new thing, bright orange and yellow, lovely ordinary flowers.

The squirrels (or jays?) have planted oaks in the boxes, which I water like the rest, but Hackney is most lucky with its foreign refugees, the garden escapees like Buddleia davidii (from China) that grows out of the rail embankments and the walls of the canal. The long, purple spikes have mostly turned brown now, spilling their seed onto the very edge of the canal, itself already ragged with mallow and sycamore seedlings – sycamore, that (Mediterranean) non-native which colonises every deserted garden in the borough along with the native elder. On the north side of London Fields those other Mediterraneans, the horse chestnuts shed their shiny brown conkers onto the road, seeds looking for the safety of wet, autumnal earth.

To the east, out on the marshes another garden escapee is now abundant, mixed in with the arching stems of bramble, the red berries of the hawthorn and the scarlet rose hips: drifts of Michaelmas daisies froth about, promiscuously hybridising into a hundred shades of white and mauve, providing late nectar for the bees before their heads explode in clouds of downy seed, to begin again.

This one wild spot on the borough’s eastern edge makes me imagine all the millennia of seeds beneath Hackney streets, makes me want to peel back the concrete, unlay the paving slabs. Beneath the pavement, the beach; beneath our feet, the forest.