Losing Ground

It was never meant to be, this urban reserve tucked between flats and roads and railway arches.  If there hand been no global downturn, no subsequent recession, it would already have been a rash of buildings by now, towering over its neighbours. Offices, shops, bars, more flats - probably elegant squares, raised flower beds, a few graceful, obedient trees. 

Instead, chancer edgeland plants took advantage of every gap and crack in the concrete remains of this patch of land and turned it into their scrappy, verdant, wasteland home.  For ignorant years I paid it no heed - never truly even saw it there.  I'm not sure when my moment of conversion arrived, but one day I wondered, and wandered, and was hooked.

What?  Where?  I'm talking about Middlewood Locks in Salford, at the erstwhile start of the Manchester Bolton Bury canal.  It's across the road from Hot Bed Press, and has been a scrubby stretch of unkempt land ever since I joined the printmaking studio.  Now it's fenced off and full of bulldozers, towering hills of soil, of bricks, and becoming after all what was originally intended.  

But while it lasted it had a fragile beauty on the unbuilt, gentle slope.  During the warmer months, a summer tapestry in old gold, shot through with threads of jade and sunshine, soft ruby and clear skies.  The comfortable hum of bumble bees, the heat-shimmer whirr of grasshoppers; impressionist butterfly wings, jazzy daytime moths.  Above the acid green marbling on the truncated stretches of canal darted electric blue damselflies.  Birds?  I never saw much beyond pigeons and corvids, although I heard there were wheatears in summer.  Mostly I was looking down, like those people in the carpet ads, seeing what was underfoot. 

In winter it shrank back to a world of concrete and tarmac, scattered with tired grass and hinting at nothing.  No whispers of the vast drifts of coltsfoot to come; not a single thing to hint at a later season's bee orchids.  The joy of the place was not so much in the individual plants (although it was that too) as in their joint profusion.  That tapestry again - the differing leaf shapes, shades, textures, the interweaving of colours and heights, the mass of insect life.  Everything belonged.  Ragwort, for instance - it wouldn't be welcome anywhere else, but here it was at home, side by side with red clover and melilot, moon daisies and vetches.  Nothing crowded out anything else, there was room for all.

This was no park.  It was an abandoned site, and while in that state it was doubtless used for all sorts.  Plenty of rubbish was dotted around but it didn't appear to dominate, or perhaps I just took little notice - it wasn't what I was there for.  In truth Middlewood Locks was a confusion of common weeds, large and small, of regular insects, of scummy water and detritus, nothing more, but for me this temporary and shabby oasis was a world of small beauties, slow pleasures.  It yielded up its secret delights when it chose.

It was closer looking that delivered little thrills.  It took me many visits before I noticed, for instance, that at the heart of each hogweed umbrel (well, probably hogweed - I remain wary around a group of superficially similar flowers that encompasses many poisonous ones, including hemlock) there was a single floret coloured anything from blush pink to deep, rich, wine red.  

In the end the site was re-sold, after which transformation was only a matter of time.  A bank and ditch system was flung up around its border - a hint of hill fort - and now it has become a fortress, barred and locked and guarded.  Who knows, perhaps its ephemeral state was a part of the attraction?  Certainly, that a rich and varied garden could grow on such unpromising ground was heartening, and it consoles me to know that the natural world has the ability to take advantage of the slightest window.  In the end, wherever, it tends to win out.  I find that hopeful.