The Urban Hedgerow

Walking to work yesterday through the back streets of Camden in the oppressive heat (oh to be back in Cornwall - roll on Friday), I rounded a corner and was enveloped in a lovely scent. It was sweet and quite delicate but it pervaded the whole street as I walked along. I looked around expecting to see a showy flower in a garden somewhere, but there weren't any gardens, just a scruffy hedgerow between the road and a wall on the otherside of which was the railway. Then I noticed the starry sawdust all over the pavement and wall...



...which made me look up, and then I found the source of the smell.



The scrappy and rather bashed Privet that was growing all along the wall was flowering it's heart out!
Interspersed with self sown Elder, Sycamore and Bramble, the Privet and the odd Lilac had obviously once been planted in an attempt at prettifying the area, but it looked like no-one had paid a blind bit of notice since. The ground was rubbish strewn and the shrubs had missing cat notices pinned to them, and large warning signs announcing 'anti climb products in use' in-between them. But despite all this the Privet was soldiering on.

   

Ably assisted by some impressive Buddleia, these hardy and determined plants were colonising and greening an unkempt, unloved and ignored patch of ground, and making it into something lovely to see, smell and hear (the bees loved it to).

All hail pioneering plants - we will never call you nasty weeds again!
(well unless you are in my garden and in my way!)