Handkerchief tree appreciation post
Bract summer
Good morning from the garden! It’s 6.53 a.m., and I’m out here with a jackdaw, who’s making a nest in a chimney, and I can hear a wood pigeon nearby.1 I remembered to water the garden yesterday evening, so all the plants are looking very content.
Yesterday was my first day of feeling well again, after more than a week of Covid. I went for a walk along the weirs, and then to one of my favourite places in town: the Dean Garnier Garden next to Winchester Cathedral, which stands on the site of what used to be, in medieval times, the monks’ dormitory, and is now a pretty walled garden. I looked up online just now and noticed a three-star review titled, ‘Ultimately, just a garden’. That reminds me of the illustration project Subpar Parks, a brilliant Instagram account and now a book, of posters created out of reviews by unimpressed visitors to the US’s incredible national parks. From the blurb of the book:
Millions of visitors each year enjoy Glacier National Park, but for one visitor, it was simply “Too cold for me!” Another saw the mind-boggling vistas of Bryce Canyon as “Too spiky!” Never mind the person who visited the thermal pools at Yellowstone National Park and left thinking, “Save yourself some money, boil some water at home.”
There’s one about Muir Woods in California, which I have visited, that says ‘Just looks like your standard forest’.
If super-tall redwood trees and chipmunks running around your feet is standard, I’ll take it!
[Pausing here to go to the car boot sale].
…
[Resuming writing after the car boot, a walk, lunch, and an afternoon nap – what a Sunday!]
Back to the Dean Garnier Garden (this post is the first time I’ve ever called it that, as we always refer to it simply as ‘the peace garden’). I noticed that the handkerchief tree had lost its handkerchiefs already (RHS tells me the official word for these white papery leaves/flowers is ‘bracts’). I therefore headed straight to Abbey Gardens aka the park, to see about my favourite tree in town – another, bigger handkerchief tree. The same!
All bracts gone. It seems very unlucky that I miss a week or so of outdoor life and in that time my favourite sight has been and gone.
Here’s a photo of the tree from the last two years:
I know nature doesn’t stick to a calendar, but I’m putting the dates in my diary for next year!
What’s a ‘sign of summer’ you wouldn’t want to miss? Hawthorn blossoming? Swallows arriving? The solstice?
See this video on Insta. ‘Every British person knows this absolute banger in the morning … [a wood pigeon sound]’.
