The third day

Not so early out on the third day of the heatwave. But I was awake eough to notice a new-to-me hole in a hedge at the West Hill end of Manor Green Road.

Was it just the removal of what appears to be a dead branch of modest size? Lower left, in the snap above.

Zoomed above. Despite walking past this hedge maybe half a dozen times every week, I could not bring to mind an image of what it was before. I don't think that I had noticed that it was a yew rather than a leylandii either. Yet another example of seeing things without taking them in. If it had changed overnight from being a yew to being a leylandii, would I have noticed that?

On the first early start, earlier in the week, I had noticed a whole lot of flat cardboard boxes on the front counter of an otherwise empty and shut-up Gail's. On this occasion, perhaps an hour or so later in the morning, someone was busily unpacking bread from a similar lot of boxes. So if the Gail's delivery lorry comes around in the small hours, before anyone has turned up, how does he get in? Do Gail's trust their drivers with pass keys for all the shops on their round? Does one key do all of them?

Maybe I will remember to ask the next time I have occasion to use them, which is not often.

An early convolvulus on the town side of the Screwfix underpass. The snap not quite capturing the intense, creamy whiteness I so admire in these flowers.

The Screwfix whitebeam. Coming up to 07:00 and the sun had not got to it yet, at least not past the top of it.

Some nettles above the Longmead stream in full flower. And they were not wilting, as some of them had been the day before.

By the fifth day of sun, the white pyracantha flowers had gone over. This being around 06:30 on Friday morning.

A bit cooler, so I went for a mid-morning circuit, picking up a few trolleys, 

I went on to forget to pick up my pills. On the other hand, I had suddenly had a fancy for raspberry jam, so went into Waitrose for that, to find that a good portion of the space which had been grocery, had been given over to household goods. I remembered reading about some directive from some new director at Waitrose, fresh from Tesco's or somewhere like that, ruling that it did not make good retail sense for Waitrose not to stock the household goods carried by John Lewis. He may be right, but I was just annoyed by the reduction in grocery: I only very rarely buy household goods.

A reduction which seemed to mean that I could not buy raspberry jam; rather, I had to buy foreign jam, in this case a fancily got up brand called St. Dalfour and a spread rather than a jam. Got it home to find that it was made from raspberries, grape concentrate and date concentrate, this last so that they could claim that it contained no unnatural sweeteners - by which I assume they meant sugar from sugar cane or sugar beet.

I tried it this morning and was not at all impressed. A sickly, syrupy quantity nothing much like the raspberry jam we used to make at home all those years ago. Probably involving both an evil copper preserving pan as well as sugar.

Maybe it is all a plot to take in surplus product from the vine growers of France and the date growers of what was French North Africa?

In any event, a triumph of packaging over jam.

Out again in the afternoon, Coming across another trolley - and a serious leak outside the house which used to be called the Albion. Water bubbling out nicely from under the displaced bricks, upper centre in the snap above. Still bubbling nicely the following morning, that is to say this morning. Trolley visible left.

Got my pills this time round, and onto Stones Road, where I came across this handsome shrub. Google Images says ballerina rose, which looks plausible enough.

I then try him on a zoom from the same snap. He agrees with himself, which is as it should be. Further corroboration at reference 1.

Although it does occur to me that there might be lots of flowering shrubs of this general appearance. How do I eliminate that possibility?

Another puzzle is how Google Images does as well as it does on plant identification without having been taught anything about botany and the anatomy of plants, detailed knowledge of which is used by  humans for such identification. Is all that sort of thing hidden inside Google Image's learning process, or is it just using a statistical sledge hammer? Brawn rather than brain?

I should say that he does, in his commentary on images of flowers, use some floral jargon, but nothing like as much as, for example, is to be found in Bentham & Hooker.

On into the passage leading to the Screwfix underpass, where I came across a surprise small clump of large leaved ivy. Perhaps it is nothing to do with ground condition and position, rather a mutant?

Plus some half opened convolvulus flowers, with the five petalled structure being much more prominent than in the fully opened flower above.

And I had remembered to carry along my secateurs and clasp knife. So I was able to take the year's growth of ivy off the base of the whitebeam. A lot of it, but easy enough to get off with the clasp knife's spike, so need for the secateurs at all.

Trunk snapped above after removal with the bark contrasts in the snap above nearly all down to the light. Nothing much to do with the bark itself.

The ivy had grown around the sunny half of the trunk. 

I did not remove all the ivy last year, just taking out the bottom foot or so, and some of the relics of that operation were down to fragile tubes, off white in colour, the insides having rotted away. While one or two of them were still showing life, just about sucking a living from the trunk below. Or perhaps from the water caught up in debris accumulating in odd places.

The year's harvest. Now in the brick compost bin at the top of our garden. Seemed a bit untidy just to chuck it in the hedge adjacent.

PS: I didn't know what to make of the scheme advertised at reference 3. Bonkers it may be, but it seems to be getting both funding and air time. Was the FT having trouble filling up its quota of square metres that day?

References

Reference 1: https://www.davidaustinroses.co.uk/products/ballerina.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/chicken-dinners.html. Previous notice of the need for ivy action.

Reference 3: ‘Bonkers’: the audacious plan for a 1mn-person city near Cambridge: Shiv Malik, a former journalist, conceived his vision of timber skyscrapers after chronicling how young people were struggling - Chris Smyth, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiv_Malik.

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