Monday, 22 June 2015

In An English City Allotment

( with apologies to Percy Grainger ) 

If you stand on tiptoe and squint , you can see John Lewis . The 14 bus rattles past one side and the 34 past the other . Scrawny cats chase magpies who scold back , safely  perched on shed roofs .






 
 You trip over shards of pottery everywhere





 
The bread shop over the road does chunky cheese rolls to eat in the sun or you can pick up a baked potato from the butcher's   ...   or there's a Chinese takeaway a step further .
Bees hover over a banana skin . A little boy brandishes a pink butterfly net .
There's an old swing and a slide the commitee's put up to entertain the growing number of ever younger allotmenteers' children  . 
You flail at nettles and are mesmerised by hoverflies .
Lug water from the standpipe to rescue the pansies .
And take home radishes , beans and glowing , exhausted children .

7 comments:

colleen said...

All the reasons why I love to be on the allotment! Except this one looks pristine and rather better cared for than ours at the moment. Not that there are weeds really, just that the soil is so poor that it has needed rather more water than the weather has been providing.

materfamilias said...

Thank you so much for sharing this! I love the aesthetic and ethos of communal/allotment gardens, of urban gardens especially, for the way they soften a city's concrete edges and signal hope.

Jocelyn said...

This space is so incredibly charming. I wan to be there NOW.

shandy said...

Just love those shards of pottery! On our old allotment, I dug up enough to make a patchwork plate.

Lucille said...

I'm intrigued about the location of this allotment. I see no high rise buildings. And you had me ready to jump on a number 14 bus to come and collect shards.

SmitoniusAndSonata said...

Lucille ... No , Leicester doesn't really do high-rise and these allotments do lie just outside the city gates .
But the Red Leicester cheese rolls were perfect for gardeners/shard collectors !

Liz Hinds said...

Beautiful! Allotments are such a wonderful invention.