Of loss and botany

By the main entrance to the building where I work was placed, at its building, a patch of bare earth; brownish clay, baked to dust on top, once planted with grass out of hope rather than gardening wisdom.

On it grew a vibrant mass of weeds, including, in great profusion, one I've never seen anywhere else; thick juicy stems of an almost-yellowly-verdant implausible green, large white flowers beginning to come out, and, as I particularly noticed as I wandered down to the pub for lunch today, the most amazing fruit.

(the colour balance is correct for the image on the white paper, but the lighting of the one on the wood - my current desktop backdrop - is perhaps prettier).

When I came back from the pub, a man with a ride-on mower had almost finished mowing the verge into oblivion. I walked along, tears in my eyes, and found one mown-off stem on which a fruit still stood intact; to the joshing of my friends, I pulled the fruit from the stem and took it to the office, thence home.

My best bet, from the stems and the way the fruit attached to them, is that it's some sort of wild relative of the courgette, with a fruit fortified by millenia of evolution against the grinding molars of the woolly rhinoceros and the delicate tongue of the wild Pleistocene horse; sadly not fortified against the motor mower. It's not as if the verge was not rendered vastly more ugly by the efforts of the mower.

At least I know, whatever they were, that they grow splendidly in this climate on the poor soil of this area; I imagine my fruit is not matured enough to grow if I plant it, but someone, somewhere among the gardeners of this vast and varied planet, will probably have seeds.

A significant pixel

I thought it was time for new ljpics.

The significance of this one is likely to become less obvious as we get further from 4th June ... I'm slightly surprised that, even with the sharpest sharpening the GIMP can offer, the relevant part of the picture actually comes out when it's this small.

If I manage to wake up at a sensible time tomorrow, I'll go to the Air Tattoo at Fairford, after which I can give all my gentle readers, and more so all my readers who delight in Things That Go Fast And Explode, a hopeless overdose of Military Aircraft of the Early 2000s. Thence to nou's party; it took all week to recover from julietk's party last weekend, I hope it doesn't take quite so long this time.