Wall

In a short sunny break from today's cloud and rain, I was able to take time to examine an old stone wall not too far from here, south facing but I think fairly well shaded for much of the day, and so still well clad with growing and flowering plants despite the recent heatwave.  I love the plants that colonise stone walls, with ivy-leaved toadflax and yellow corydalis as personal favourites, along with the little ferns known as spleenworts.  I introduced the toadflax and corydalis to our last garden, but the toadflax sadly only lasted one season.  I've often failed to introduce stone wall plants to gardens, and yet they manage to plant themselves, very successfully, in what seem like much more hostile situations.  The toadflax actually plants its own seeds into crevices in the rock, which the seed-bearing stems seek out - quite a remarkable process.  Anyway, I notice that we do already have spleenwort growing on a wall in our present garden, so maybe there'll be the chance for some successful (this time) introductions from elsewhere.

Meanwhile, here is a poem I published in my most recent collection, last year, though in fact I wrote it some years earlier :-

This ancient wall has seen so many summers:
sun sparkles now on quartz grains in the stone
as I sit here to take the valley view,
the climbing oaken hillsides and the river.

The constant hum of insect life around me
shows how these sterile rocks have come to life;
and the delicate spleenworts, purple toadflax,
valerian red, and brash yellow of corydalis,
have been quick to exploit the cracks that time has made.

Consider this:  that though the summer’s warmth
makes this wall now a bright and busy place,
it was the winter’s sharp and frosting blade,
the blast of storm wind, sweep of rain and snow -
the dark days brought these stones to what they are,
and opened up the ways to let them live.