Blue and Orange

I did a good couple of hours’ weeding and tidying in the churchyard this morning, and we put up the last of the memorial plaques in the latest batch that I’ve organised. I tidied and deadheaded all the flowers and plants etc left at the memorial wall, and threw the dead ones onto the compost heap. In theory if we keep it looking nice then visitors might hopefully do likewise, though the number of rubber bands, bits of cellophane wrapping and sachets of flower food I pick up and dispose of is sometimes a bit disheartening. We are allowed to remove plastic flowers, as they tend to break down with exposure to the elements and then the little bits of plastic are harmful to the natural environment. It’s time-consuming rootling about for all the tiny little pieces that have blown around the churchyard too. Cloth flowers always become grey and dingy, and sadly give an impression of neglect. My advice to families would be to save their money, as we only throw them away when they deteriorate and become torn and shabby. As with the plastic flowers, these also cannot be recycled. People are asked by the Rector not to leave artificial flowers, but they do it anyway.

I tidied a bit of my own back garden when I got home. The Bluecrown Passionflower (Passiflora caerulea) in the secret garden has almost completely taken over and will need extensive cutting back. It has started to grow its fruit, and some of this has ripened. I’ve blipped one, with a flower in the far background. The fruit is an oval orange-yellow berry, about 2 inches long and around 1.5 inches in diameter, containing numerous red seeds. It is edible to humans when ripe, but tends to have an undesirable flavour unless allowed to fully ripen in a warm climate and fall naturally from the vine, when it has a mild blackberry flavour. A herbal tea can be made of the flower or leaves; however I don’t think I’ll be trying this, as the plant’s leaves contain chemicals which can react with enzymes to release hydrogen cyanide. It is apparently possible to boil away most of the cyanide, but I’m not taking any chances…!

Laundry in the washing machine and lunch eaten, I dealt with the remaining paperwork for the memorial plaques and wrote an email to the family of the one we put up this morning to let them know it is done, attaching photos showing where to locate it on the wall.

I would have liked to have got a bit more sorting done now that the weather is mercifully cooler, but I have run out of time today. Just got to put out the garden waste bin, recycling and food waste for collection tomorrow and then supper.