Lindenpfad

The lime trees are turning

Every autumn the avenue behind the old brewery goes yellow from the top down, as if somebody were pouring light into the crowns and it slowly ran towards the ground. The small-leaved limes go first; the broad-leaved ones along the canal hold on for another week or two. I walked the full length this morning, about forty minutes at an unhurried pace, and counted the trees that have been replaced since spring: three, all near the bus stop where the pavement was dug up for new cables.

The replacements are young and still tied to their stakes. One of them already has the proper heart-shaped leaves, the other two look a little lost. The council sign says they are Tilia cordata 'Greenspire', which is a sensible choice for a street: narrow, tidy, tolerant of salt in winter. Still, I miss the old crooked tree that stood in that gap. It had a hollow at knee height where children left conkers and once, memorably, a small plastic dinosaur that stayed there for an entire summer.

What I like about lime avenues is that they are never quite silent. In June they hum with bees, in July the sticky honeydew turns the parked cars glossy, in autumn the leaves fall slowly and make a dry, papery sound underfoot. In winter you can finally see the shape of the branches, the way they were pollarded decades ago and then left alone, so that every tree carries a little record of the gardeners who looked after it.

A street with trees is a street that remembers the people who planted them.

On the way back I took the side path by the allotments. Somebody has hung a row of dried sunflower heads along their fence for the birds. The great tits had found them already and were working through the seeds with real determination, ignoring me completely.

Saving bean seed, the lazy way

I grow two kinds of climbing beans: a speckled borlotti that came from a neighbour years ago, and a purple-podded one that I bought once and have kept going ever since. Saving the seed is the easiest thing in the garden, which is probably why I keep doing it. You simply stop picking from a few plants in late August and let the pods dry on the vine until they rattle.

The only real decision is which plants to leave. I try to pick the healthiest ones, the plants that started early and kept going without sulking during the dry spell. Over the years this has made a visible difference: my borlottis now climb faster than the ones from the packet, and they seem to forgive me when I forget to water them for a week.

• Leave the pods on the plant until they are papery and pale.
• If rain is forecast, pull the whole plant and hang it upside down in the shed.
• Shell the beans on a dry evening and spread them on newspaper for another week.
• Store in paper envelopes, labelled with the year. Jars invite mould.

A small tip I learned the hard way: put the envelopes in the freezer for two days before storing them. It kills any bean weevil eggs that might be hiding inside. The first year I skipped this I opened the box in March and found little round holes in half the seeds, and a few very satisfied beetles.

The purple beans lose their colour when cooked, which disappoints every child I have ever served them to. They turn an ordinary green within a minute of boiling. I have stopped apologising and now present it as a magic trick.

River path after the floods

The water came up higher than usual this year, and for nearly two weeks the lower river path was closed. When it opened again it looked like a different place. The flood had laid a fine grey silt over everything: the benches, the low branches, the steps down to the old ferry landing. In places you could see the exact height of the water as a neat line on the tree trunks, a little above my shoulder.

Nature recovers faster than we expect. Within a week the nettles had pushed through the silt, and the willows that had been underwater for days were already putting out new shoots along their stems. The path itself is still soft in places. I would not recommend it with a pram or a bicycle until the council has brought in some gravel.

What surprised me most were the things the river left behind. A football, faded almost white. A garden chair, upright and facing the water, as if somebody had placed it there deliberately to watch the current. Planks, plenty of plastic, and one perfectly intact clay flower pot sitting in the fork of an alder about two metres above the ground. I left the pot where it was. It seemed to belong there now.

There were also two herons fishing in the new shallow pools that formed in the meadow. They stood motionless for so long that a jogger stopped beside me to ask whether they were real.

A short list of good benches

Over the years I have developed strong opinions about benches. A good bench needs three things: a view that changes with the seasons, a little shade in the afternoon, and a back rest set at an angle that suits people who intend to stay for a while. Most benches fail on the third point. They are designed for waiting, not for sitting.

These are the ones I keep returning to, in no particular order:

• The bench above the weir. Wooden, slightly crooked, facing west. In the evening the light comes straight down the river and the noise of the water covers the traffic from the bridge.
• The memorial bench in the cemetery park. The plaque reads "She liked it here". It is impossible to sit on it without agreeing.
• The stone bench by the orchard. Cold until noon, warm until dusk. Old apple varieties all around, labelled by the local school: Gravensteiner, Boskoop, Kaiser Wilhelm.
• The two chairs at the allotment gate. Not officially a bench. Owned by Mr Nowak, who lets anybody sit if they listen to at least one story about his tomatoes.

The worst bench in the district stands at the new roundabout, facing the traffic lights, with no back rest and a metal bar in the middle to stop anybody lying down. I have never seen a person sit on it. Pigeons approve of it, though.

Compost, honestly

Books about compost make it sound like chemistry: carbon and nitrogen in the correct ratio, moisture like a wrung-out sponge, turning every two weeks. My compost is more like a family argument that eventually settles itself. Everything goes in, nothing is measured, and about eighteen months later there is dark crumbly soil at the bottom of the bin that smells of a forest floor.

I do follow a few rules. No cooked food, because of the rats. No perennial weeds with roots, because bindweed survives anything, including, I suspect, a nuclear winter. Plenty of cardboard torn into strips, because the kitchen waste alone turns into a slimy mess. And I keep a second bin standing empty, so that when the first one is full I can simply fork everything across. That counts as turning, and it is the only turning it gets.

The bins are wooden and home-made from old pallets. They are not beautiful, but they have lasted seven years. A wren nests in the gap behind them every spring and shouts at me whenever I come near with the bucket.

Compost is patience you can put your hands in.

This summer I finally sieved a full barrow of the finished stuff for seed sowing. The seedlings took off as if they had been waiting for it. I felt absurdly proud, as though I had personally invented decomposition.

Walking the old tram line

Until the late sixties a tram ran from the market square out to the villages on the eastern side of the river. The rails were removed long ago, but the route survives as a strange straight line through the suburbs: a footpath here, a row of garages there, a gap between houses that is slightly too wide for any other explanation. Last Sunday I tried to follow it from start to finish with an old map from the library.

The first part is easy. The path behind the post office still has the original kerb stones, and two of the iron poles that once held the wires now carry street lamps. After the railway bridge the line disappears under a supermarket car park. I lost it for a while and found it again by noticing that the back gardens of one street all end at exactly the same angle, as if somebody had drawn a ruler across them.

The best section runs through an overgrown strip between the cemetery and the allotments. Here the embankment still stands, about a metre high, covered in hawthorn and wild roses. An old man walking his dog told me that he rode this tram to school as a boy, and that the driver used to stop between stations to let passengers pick cherries in June. I have no way of checking this and I have decided to believe it completely.

The last stop was apparently near the village church. Nothing remains there except a bus shelter in the same place and, inside it, a timetable that is wrong in an entirely modern way.

Total distance: just under eleven kilometres. Total cherries: none yet, but I marked the trees on the map.

What the garden taught me this year

Every spring I make a list of things I will do differently, and every autumn I find the list in a drawer and laugh at it. This year I am trying the opposite: a list of things the garden did without my help, so I can stop interfering with them.

• The self-seeded calendula came up in the gravel path and flowered for five months. The ones I sowed in the bed sulked.
• The rhubarb, which I keep meaning to divide, produced more stalks than ever. I suspect it knows I am bluffing.
• The wild strawberries along the fence spread by themselves and fed the blackbirds, which then left the raspberries alone. A fair exchange.
• The fennel I forgot to harvest flowered and brought in more hoverflies than I have ever seen, and the aphids on the beans disappeared within a fortnight.

The lesson, if there is one, is that a small garden runs best as a negotiation. I decide roughly where things go, and the plants decide whether they agree. When they do not, they move. The poppies have now been migrating towards the south corner for three years, and I have stopped pretending it was my idea.

Next year I will try leaving one bed entirely to itself and writing down what arrives. If nothing else, it will make the list shorter.

Early mornings in the park

Between half past five and half past six the city park belongs to a very particular group of people: the gardeners in their green jackets, a few runners, the woman who feeds the ducks with exactly one slice of bread every day, and the dog walkers who greet each other by the names of their dogs rather than their own. I am usually there for the birds. In April the dawn chorus is at its loudest, and for half an hour the park sounds like a room full of people all talking at once.

The blackbird starts first, then the robin, then the wren with a song far too loud for its size. The chiffchaff arrives in early April and repeats its own name with great seriousness. By the time the first trams pass on the main road, most of the birds have moved on to the business of feeding, and the park goes back to being a park.

I have learned to recognise maybe twenty songs. That is not much, but it changes a walk completely. Instead of noise there is a crowd of individuals, each with a territory and an opinion about it.

A year of the same walk

Last December I decided to take the same walk once a week for a full year: out of the front door, down to the canal, along the lime avenue to the old brewery, through the allotments, along the river path to the weir and back over the hill. About seven kilometres, roughly ninety minutes if I do not stop, which I always do. I took a photograph from the same five spots each time and wrote a few lines in a notebook when I got home.

Fifty-two walks later, the notebook is the most interesting thing I own. Read in one sitting, it shows the year moving in a way that ordinary memory never does. The first snowdrops under the hedge by the brewery on the eleventh of February. The first swifts screaming over the church on the second of May. The day the canal froze, the day it thawed, the day somebody painted the footbridge green and the day the paint began to peel. The blackbird that sang from the same television aerial every week from March to July and then simply stopped.

There are human seasons too. The ice-cream kiosk by the weir opens on the first warm weekend and closes the day after the school holidays end, regardless of the weather. The allotment gardeners appear in March in large numbers and disappear gradually through October, like migrating birds. The fishermen on the river path change with the species: pike in winter, carp in summer, and a single patient man who seems to fish for nothing in particular all year round and has never, to my knowledge, caught anything.

The photographs are less interesting than I hoped individually, but laid side by side they are oddly moving. The same lime tree, bare, then green, then gold, then bare again. The same bench, empty, then occupied by an elderly couple for several weeks in summer, then empty again. I never learned their names.

You do not need to travel far to see a lot. You need to pass the same place often enough to notice it changing.

I will keep going this year, with a fresh notebook. The rule stays the same: same route, every week, whatever the weather. The only change is that I now carry a small bag of sunflower seeds for the great tits at the allotment gate, who have clearly started to recognise me and wait on the fence on Sunday mornings.

Pruning the old pear

The pear tree at the bottom of the garden is older than the house. Nobody knows exactly how old: the previous owner thought sixty years, the man from the nursery guessed closer to eighty after looking at the bark. It still gives a heavy crop every other year, small hard pears that ripen in the cellar in November and taste of honey and something faintly like cloves.

For a long time I was afraid to prune it. Old trees seem to deserve respect, and it is hard to cut a branch that has been growing since before you were born. But the crown had become a thicket of water shoots, and the fruit was getting smaller every year. So this March, on a dry day with no frost forecast, I finally climbed up with a saw and a lot of advice from a book.

The rule I followed was simple: no more than a fifth of the tree in one winter. Dead wood first, then the branches that cross and rub against each other, then the vertical shoots in the middle that steal all the light. I stepped back after every cut and looked at the shape from the kitchen window. It took the whole afternoon and I removed far less than I had planned.

The tree looks lighter now, more like itself. Whether it agrees we will find out in September. The cut branches are stacked behind the shed for the hedgehogs, and the smallest twigs went into the stove, where pear wood burns with a sweet smell that filled the whole house.

Winter allotments

Allotments in winter are honest places. Without the leaves and flowers you can see how each plot is really organised: the neat ones with their raised beds and labelled paths, the chaotic ones with half-finished projects and piles of materials that might be useful one day, and the abandoned ones slowly turning back into meadow.

I walk through the allotment colony near the railway almost every week in February. The sheds are the best part. Each one is a small piece of architecture built from whatever was available: old windows, doors from demolished flats, corrugated iron, a ship's porthole in one memorable case. Most have a bench outside and a rain barrel, and many have a small chimney for a wood stove, because a cup of tea in a cold shed is one of the great pleasures of the gardening year.

Some gardeners are already at work. They turn the soil, cut back the raspberries, and set out potatoes in egg boxes on the windowsills of their sheds to sprout. One woman showed me her collection of seed packets, organised by sowing month in a shoebox with cardboard dividers. She has kept the same plot for thirty-one years and said she still learns something new every season.

On the way out I passed a plot where somebody had built a scarecrow from an old suit and a bicycle helmet. It looked like a commuter who had stopped to think and never moved again.

Small notes on a big storm

The storm in the second week of January took down more trees than any I can remember. On my usual route along the canal I counted nine fallen limes and two poplars, one of which lay across the footbridge like a dropped matchstick. The council crews worked for days with chainsaws, and for a week the whole district smelled of fresh sawdust.

What struck me was how differently the trees had broken. The poplars snapped high up, leaving tall jagged trunks. The limes mostly came out by the roots, lifting great discs of earth and pavement with them, as if they had simply decided to lie down. One old oak in the park lost a single huge branch and otherwise stood completely unbothered, which is very much the personality of an oak.

Some of the wood has already found new uses. The school took several trunks for a natural playground, and a local carpenter collected the straightest lime logs for carving. Lime wood is soft and even, and has been used for carving for centuries. Perhaps some of the trees from our canal will end up as spoons, bowls or small figures on a mantelpiece somewhere. I like that thought more than I expected to.