PEACH-LEAF BELLFLOWER

I made the mistake of ‘applying updates’ at 23:45. My computer is churning through 45% after three quarters of an hour.

“Don’t turn off your PC,” says Windows. “This will take a while.”

So then, just enough time to tell you I found campanula persicifolia in my garden today. Peach-leaf bellflower. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was so I looked it up. It’s a delightful little purple hooded flower with yellowish stamen, wistfully spouting from a green stem at a rather handsome height of around 30cm. There it was, bobbing in the long grass.

Nature’s amazing. A single example of one of those flowers on Mars and it would be front page news for days; here, in my garden (and cosmically speaking that really isn’t all that far from Mars in the grand scheme of things) they’re happily ordinary, waving in the July sunshine, anonymous, amidst a planet of infinite natural variety and colour.

I was less successful with the little black and orange bug I saw crawling up my raincoat the other day. Whatever it was, whichever of the millions of insect species it was will remain a mystery. I couldn’t photo it either - too small for the lens to focus on. All that’s certain is that these little crawlers are quite unique to our lovely planet, just like the campanula persicifolia. Nowhere else has them.

It’s wild of course. It’s just grown there without design - much like everything else in my jungle-like garden. Wildflowers, long grass, weeds that once were uprootable and now are taller than me; it’s a regular labyrinth of wilderness.

But I don’t feel shame. Some would; maybe my neighbours think I ought to bend closer to embarrassment at letting nature take its course. I’m not flexing that way though, but then neither am I intending to go on keeping it so untameable. Someone’s coming over soon with power tools and a box full of patience.

But not now. For now, I’m waiting for Windows to do its own weeding and strimming, through all the files and cookies and libraries that need attention. I have left it late.

Persici - peach. Folia - leaf. Campanula - little bell. Makes sense. Happy little flower, blossoming in an overgrown and wild garden, on a planet where that kind of thing is, on the whole, enormously encouraged. I’m glad I live here.