My daily experience is full of brambles and briars, and their... not thorns, but prickles. (While a poet may suggest that a rose and its cousins have thorns, a botanist will tell you otherwise. A thorn, they’ll say, is a modified leaf or piece of stem, while the pokey bits on a rose are outgrowths of its outer rind, or bark). Perhaps as a result of its dermal origins, a prickle seems to have an affinity for skin, breaking away from that of its host and working its way under your own, where it worries away at your day.
Deal with it quickly, and it’s gone. Try to ignore it, and it might go quiet for a while, but soon it’s back, nagging insistently. Eventually, your body has enough of the thing and pushes it to the surface – garden shrapnel – till you have no alternative but to face up to reality and sort it out.
This Substack is supposed to be about my garden – what goes on there, and what grows there. The two aren’t necessarily the same, and sometimes a plant will be very present to me here in spite of, or perhaps because of its absence. It will have worked its way into my head through some chance encounter, and found its way onto one of several lists:
things I’d like to grow, but can't on this soil, or in this climate
things I’d like to grow, but have yet to understand how they’d work here
things I’m fully intending to grow, but haven't got round to getting hold of yet
things I’d love to be growing here, but have somehow managed to kill. Often, several times.
These plants are my mental prickles, and in an occasional series of short posts (shorter than this, which has already gone on for too long), I’d be delighted to share them with you.
Beginning next week, with the crucifixion thorn.
One of my favourite peppers, although I have never sen one with bark like that - mine are much smoother on the trunk. What a pleasure they are, other than when you get scratched to high heaven
We need to get that list sorted Mr O’B. I suggest a shopping trip at the earliest opportunity! Great read.