Floriferous London

My weekly botany course is coming to the end of term. Taught by the wonderful David Bevan - a former conservation officer who is a curious, gentle hybrid of David Attenborough and Patrick Moore; we convene on Monday afternoons in Highgate to hear his stories of the plants that live alongside us.
So what have I learned?
To name and love those rogue weeds that appear in my garden. It sounds so much better to say that herb robert, herb bennett and gallant soldier are colonising my tiny borders.
That plants are valued for their ability to survive. And in London's landscape of disused railways, building sites and crumbling edifices, there is a whole parallel botanical world. Here, plants are economic migrants, blown, flown or transported in from different climates; they adapt to their new surroundings: buddleja is a native of cliffs in China, so think of it in a new light when you next see it sprouting from a wall or roof; they eventually even sound quite English: Oxford ragwort is Sicilian in origin and loves to grow in the klinker between railway tracks - it's like the volcanic ash of home.
That these wild London plants usually have some cracking good stories to tell: Gallant soldier is also known as Little Joey Hooker (after Sir Joseph Hooker who founded Kew Gardens...); Haringey Knotweed is a unique London hybrid - a cross between japanese Knotweed and russian vine - that inhabits, quite exclusively Railway Fields, just off Green Lanes (although was once found in a gutter in Crouch End); London Rocket, another mediterranean interloper, was first identified by 17th century botanists when it grew strictly within the City of London boundaries, only to disappear mysteriously in the 19th century - and return after the second world war.
And, next time I'm in the area, I must look out for the maidenhair spleenwort that favours the wall outside The Odeon at Muswell Hill.

400 bulbs, ten people, two hours

Bulb planting causes quite a specific range of gardening aches and pains. Apart from the prolonged crouching and bending, which are more or less de rigeur for most types of gardening activity, there's the repetitive strain of digging many small holes in hard ground, deep enough to put off greedy squirrels, who treat bulb planting as an easy treasure hunt laid on by kind humans. In a couple of sunny, Sunday afternoon hours, a bunch of us planted what should prove to be a blaze of colour next spring. It's the third year of bulb planting in the burial ground at the end of my road - and each year, the colour spreads. This year, 250 tulip bulbs arrived courtesy of the Eden Project's Big Bulb Plant. But donations of daffs went in too. Roll on 2010. Makes the winter almost worthwhile, knowing these little colour bombs will be gearing up to explode into the late winter grey and wheedle me out of hibernation.

And then there were none.

Colours 3 - October

Not very season-of-mists-and-mellow-fruitfulness. Instead, my garden this month is summed up by these amazingly intense colours from an unnamed pompom-flowered purple aster, an equally purple aconitum (monkshood) and the barbie pink salvia. A bit of subtelty from the caryopteris just going to seed and a viburnum on the verge of flowering, with backing foliage from the olive tree, plus an olive to chime in with a local produce theme.