The wasteland - what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?*
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Version 0 of 1. The fragrance of newly mown hay drying in the sun in Weardale’s meadows is just a memory now that the last cut has been gathered in, but 10 miles down the dale, in this small market town, it lingers. It grows stronger as we walk down an alley to the post office, past a bulldozed wasteland that was, until last year, the council depot. A forest of melilot (Melilotus altissima) has appeared in the brick and concrete rubble. This is a plant supercharged with coumarin, the compound that gives mown grass its heady aroma. Today the scent comes in waves, released as the plant’s tangled stems brush against each other in the warm wind. When I reach through the security fence to pluck a leaf and crush it between finger and thumb, the perfume is overpowering. Scores of honeybees cling to its lemon-yellow racemes, forcing open the flowers to reach the nectar. The plant lives up to its mellifluous scientific name, for melilotus means honey lotus. Peering through the fence we count more than 20 wildflower species, including the usual suspects from wasteland sites like this: teasels, mugwort, ragwort, poppies and mullein with its tall flower spikes and woolly leaf rosettes. Like the thistles, whose plumed seeds are already being torn apart by goldfinches and are drifting away on the wind, they are elements of an itinerant flora, forever in search of waste ground where they can put down roots. But the vast crop of melilot most likely germinated from a seed bank already in the soil, liberated by earth movers after decades of burial. Melilot, a native of the European mainland, has been known in Britain since the 16th century and was grown as a fodder crop. It fell out of favour long ago. Crook first starts to appear on maps as a hamlet at the end of the 18th century and quickly grew into a mining town after the discovery of easily worked coal seams. Perhaps this profusion of plants near the town centre is a living relic of long lost agricultural. Local rumour has it that this site will soon become a supermarket. Will the melilot seed crop be buried under concrete yet bide its time until the bulldozers come again? * With apologies to TS Eliot |