You know it’s spring when …

By ‘C’ (for Session Leader, who had to “skidaddle” at the end of the morning):

It is warm enough for creatures which had been hibernating, to venture out …

One ‘Slow Worm’ (actually a limbless lizard: Anguis fragilis) being admired this morning
before being put back in a Good Place

there are thousands of infant trees springing up, only to be systematically uprooted, because they are in the Wrong Place …

“Where have all these come from?”
– “From a sycamore tree.”

and ‘C’ swaps woolly hat for the sub-French-Foreign-Legion look:

Le képi blanc – c'est pas ça!

If the animals which live beside the River Thames experience the prompting to do a bit of spring-cleaning plus “divine discontent and longing” at the start of The Wind in the Willows, Green-Gymmers on a visit to a site beside the same river, further upstream from where Kenneth Grahame’s classic is set, were looking forward this morning to a spring-tidy with a difference.  These were some of our targets:

“Those are plants” – to be planted

Redundant planter to be emptied and dismantled

Gate-protection post (which had fulfilled its function!) – to be “replanted”
(and the other one, the other side of the gateway)

One seriously un-riverworthy fibreglass boat – to be smashed

So some of us had literally a smashing time ...

while others worked the soil:

There was still time to spare to carry out some running repairs:

Also to explore the site in search of Loddon Lilies.  Their full glory yet to come, and always hard to capture the full impression of them on film – this is, after all, the largest display of these flowers in the country:

By session end, redundant items were gone …

leaning posts had been re-set, in line with the others …

and we had all had a very satisfying time.  

That the weather had been perfect for us, was no surprise.  As one Green-Gymmer explained, "There  is always a window of good weather on a Tuesday morning.  The Virtue Effect on weather has been seriously under-estimated: where twelve people are gathered with the virtuous intention of Green Gym, there the sun shines."

How to B Goode

By ‘C’:

A rock-star may have checked his watch mid-performance, or even in the middle of a number, to ensure he would not over-run his contracted time by so much as a minute.  Green-Gymmers have been known not even to keep an eye on the time for tea-break.

There have also been occasions when volunteers have kept going after the official end of a session, in order to get a job finished.  This was one of them!  Having been so absorbed they had already run over into ‘overtime’, some workers stayed on a quarter hour longer to get one job to the point where it could safely be left to be another day:

Abstract art - or what?  Read on to find out ...

It was good to see that spring had come to ‘our’ location in Didcot: Mowbray Fields.  Come summer, whole sections will be a riot of floral colour. 

We also found there had been a few changes in layout since we were last there.  One gap in the circle of vegetation around the fill-pond area had been opened up further:

View to fill-pond area from above

View from below, towards nearby housing estate

A good sight-line between Mowbray Fields recreation ground and Mowbray Fields nature reserve encourages a wider range of members of the public to make more extensive and more responsible use of the open-access area.

Elsewhere, another gap had been plugged:

We surmise that the opening in the hedge had been used rather too often as a short-cut.

It was a double-task today.  One was “the spring cut and rake of the meadow” – which meant the warden had cut, with power-tool; and volunteers raked, with virtuous hand-tools:

The alternative task was to continue with replacing the chicken-wire on the ‘hexag’ boardwalk with staples:

Chicken-wire, freshly laid over wooden boards, may be a good anti-slip device.  Old chicken-wire, however, which has started to fray, can turn into a trip hazard.  Fencing staples, hammered in, give just as good grip, while being easier to maintain. 

The long-term project to replace the chicken-wire at this location was begun – by us – last summer, with interesting percussive results.  (No well-known composer need roll over for the Green-Gym experimental sound workshop!)  This time, having learned from experience, workers came up with some new techniques.  As one of the pioneering pair, who worked on this all morning, cheerfully explained, “John is a parallel hammerer …”

 “whereas I am a serial hammerer”:

After the caffeine and dextrose rush of tea-break, there were further refinements to the staples-for-chicken-wire programme.  Rather than guess how large an area of chicken-wire to pull up before applying the staples, one volunteer had the bright idea of hammering the staples inside the holes formed by the wire:

The redundant wire could then be removed at a later point, in workers’ own good time.

How best to accomplish that removing of old wire was also the subject of some pilot schemes.  (Green-Gymmers always ambitious to be good.)  In the end, it was decided the workers had already come up with the best method: brute force and ignorance.  Which was just as well, for owing to a communication breakdown, there was rather more chicken-wire to remove before close of play than had been intended.

Meantime, those wielding the rakes, pitchforks, and tarpaulin had completed their task.  Some joined the hammering workshop; others moved on to cutting back vegetation which would otherwise rapidly overgrow the public footpath once spring is into its running.  And finally, there was time for “testing the public-viewpoint facility”: