Truly pragmatic bollards....

Here are some bollards being pragmatic!

It looks like quite a sad tale for them. They have been summarily stacked against the lamppost while they are replaced by more robust cast-concrete bollards. Despite having environmentally-friendly credentials through being made of extruded plastic bags, they were not selected or placed for a busy roadway. Cars park regularly on this street and I have seen sufficient damage to a friend's car through attempts to park next to bollards to know that they need to take quite savage hits at times. The dust-line on these bollards shows that they would not have been very good at giving back what they got. With luck they will be moved to a different location, maybe doing people management rather than vehicle.

The photograph was taken in Willemstad, Curacao in January 2010. There is a very good tradition of recycling and reuse of physical objects in the Caribbean, so it is almost certain that the bollards would be put to a new use and not wasted.

Daffydowndilly, Lent Lily, the harbinger of spring

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal April 1802

The next plant group that I mention has to be the Daffodil. We have suffered such a long and dark, cold and bitter winter and now spring is being kept held at bay.  So much so that the Daffodil Festival in Thriplow, over the weekend 20/21 March, was widely publicised by the press having fun at its expense, because very few of the daffodils were in flower as it started. They are blatantly still 'feeling the cold' and keeping themselves for a few more days.


This genus has vast hordes of people writing about it, so I am concentrating wholely on the plants we all consider to be common daffodil, despite that being a somewhat complicated idea.  The literature is comprehensive.  I will acknowledge 2 major sources for this blog post.  Alice M Coats performed a remarkable feat in her works on the history of garden plants.  Narcissus appears in Flowers and Their Histories, published in 1956.  Penelope Hobhouse is also a major figure in the research on plants in garden history and published Plants in Garden History in 1992.  In 2002 a book was published by Taylor & Francis edited by G Hanks; Narcissus and Daffodil: The Genus Narcissus as part of a series on medicinal and aromatic plants.  It is on order so I cannot make direct reference to it for this blog post, but there are a couple of comments that I make that have been triggered by its publicity material.

Daffodil or Narcissus?  Both names have origins that may be myths.  Of course it is more scientific to use Narcissus, but Daffodil has long-standing charm and poetic celebration.  They both describe plants that are more diverse in colour and form than those with which the names are immediately associated in popular culture.  Both names in fact originate from the white rather than the yellow form of the plant.  Narcissus is known to be a Greek word and for many years it was thought this was inevitably linked to the myth of the youth tricked into looking into a still pool and seeing his own beautiful reflection for the first time, falling in love and turning into a (white) flower.  The truth is more intriguing, since it comes from Narce according to Pliny in 320BC, which 'betokeneth nummedness or dulnesse of sense', from the intensity of the aroma from the flower.  What makes this intriguing is that eastern daffodils have been found to contain quantities of Galanthamine – a narcotic chemical used in the amelioration of dementia and Alzheimer's.  Daffodil, or daffydilly as Shakespeare had it, is a corruption of Affodyl, in itself based on Asphodel, another often white plant!  The reasons for this connection have yet to be explained.

In the UK, wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) is primarily a woodland plant, behaving in a similar fashion to bluebell but normally flowering earlier in the season.  It often flowers on the First of March, which made it an obvious alternative to the leek for St David's Day adornment.  The period of its peak flowering during Lent in most years led to another old name being Lent Lily.  The wild plant is fairly small with the trumpet cloaked by the outer petals, rather than 'set off' by them as we know in the cultivated form that is so much more abundant.  The photograph was taken by Simon Davey.

There have been two phases of intense interest in growing daffodils in this country.  The first was between the mid 16th and mid 17th centuries as bulbs were collected from the hills of Europe and cultivation began to throw up new hybrids and varieties.  The Iberian peninsula is especially important for the introduction of Narcissus hispanicus, the Great Spanish Daffodil.  This magnificent plant is tall and erect with a proud bright yellow head and is one of the key ancestors for the 'common daffodil' we all think we know so well.  In 1597 Gerard listed a dozen plus different daffodils in his Herball.  Thirty years later Parkinson listed 78.

After this period of activity it all went very quiet and many of Parkinson's list went out of fashion and ceased to be available.  This may have been from a combination of factors that included both changes in the design and layout of parks and gardens that took place in this period, as well as the fall in temperatures that accompanied the Little Ice Age.  The next period of daffodil-raising began about 1837, leading to the widespread travels of Peter Barr (called the Daffodil King) who was able to refind many of the species lost since Parkinson's time.  Since his time the daffodil has gained a substantial place in the hearts of all, with numerous hybrids between yellow and white, multiple stemmed varieties and double-flowered heads that I personally have enormous affection for, but which require copious amounts of water and luck to maintain a stem strong enough to hold the heavy heads.  The Royal Horticultural Society have a Daffodil Register and Classified list from 2008 that contains 27,000 different plants identified as of garden origin up to June 2007.

What struck me very forcibly as I was putting this together was the timing of the two periods of intense cultivation compared to the penning of the lines which have made the daffodil so much a part of our cultural heritage.  Wordsworth went for his walk with his sister Dorothy exactly in the period in which the daffodil was out of favour.  It was to be a further 35 years before the  resurgence of interest began.  I then re-read the lines written by Dorothy in her Journal and thought their description more suited to the wild daffodil than those whose photograph is often put alongside reproductions or quotes of the poem.  Apparently it is widely known among botanists that he was describing wild daffodils, but it came as a surprise to me.  In fact there is a bit of concern about the health and future of the very plants he described, in 2002 the National Trust announced that they are worried that some garden variety plants that have appeared nearby may be hybridising with the Ullswater plants and that they are carrying out research to establish the origin of the new plants and come up with what to do next.  It is with a wry smile that I think of the Poet's Daffodil (otherwise called the Pheasant's Eye Daffodil) also being the white form, an incredibly beautiful plant that has been grown in cultivation for centuries, easily pre-dating Wordsworth, for whom it was never named, of course.

Daffodils herald the spring for us in such a glorious and flamboyant sunniness, encouraging joy and hope even under dark wet conditions.  Snowdrops are an appropriate beginning but we need that yellow for our hearts to lift to meet the rays of the sun.

Appreciating Lichens...

...Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
a ruined abbey, chancel only,
lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
romanesque against the sky....            
John Betjeman, Ireland with Emily.

A landscape friend of mine has asked me several times to do something about lichens, which I feel a bit shy about doing.  I am a landscape architect married to a lichenologist.  It isn't often that venturing into subjects that you know many people who know the material better than you do is particularly sensible, so I have resisted her suggestion each time she has made it.  However, lichens are a part of all of our worlds and the international lichen community is in the process of selecting their top 100 lichens.  This has started me thinking about how I would address that as a landscape architect, and not as a lichenologist.  Lichens come in all manner of shapes, sizes and textures.  They grow on all manner of surfaces, which now include my car following a couple of years of dusty summer PM10 deposits building up in crevices of windows out of the reach of the car wash.  Many of the current great lichenologists have a profound love and in-depth knowledge of tiny little dot lichens that most people wouldn't even notice. Landscape architects are more likely to prefer the more showy lichens....  (In fact the emerging list contains many very beautiful lichen species and I will add a link to the full list when it is available in the next few weeks).

The key surfaces upon which lichens grow are: rocks (saxicolous), trees (corticolous), wood (lignicolous), soil (terricolous), moss (muscicolous), other lichens (lichenicolous) as well as leaves (foliicolous) and even metal (metaliferous).  Almost all of these surfaces are ones that we work with in landscape design or management.  Graveyards are the most obvious places where people can see lichens growing and which generate a great deal of reaction to their presence.  Lyrical poetry has been written on the relationship of lichen covering to the concept of age, and occasionally it is linked to the idea of decay, which is not at all fair.  Some churchyards go to extraordinary lengths to 'clean' the churches and memorials of their lichen covering.  It is known for new stones to be polished to resist lichen cover, which is a shame and has given many modern graveyards a stark and aggressive character, with each letter etched deeply and embossed in gold leaf.

In cities such as London, until about 30 years ago, most lower plant cover of monuments, walls and trees came in the form of a dark green alga mixed with soot.  It was ugly and it felt as though everything needed a good wash.  This was due to the very high levels of industrial and coal- based pollution.  It is amazing to consider that in some cities now the air pollution levels have sunk below those of the countryside which is awash with nitrates from fertiliser.  Work being done on air quality by OPAL is showing very clearly the increase in pollution-sensitive lichens colonising urban centres, with decreases also showing in rural areas as nitrate levels increase (more information here).  OPAL is an initiative run jointly by the British Lichen Society, the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, London.

Lichens can give valuable details about the health of an area, urban or rural.  There is a lovely simple grey lichen that can tell if a piece of woodland has been under continuous canopy for over 400 years just by its very presence.  It is highly sensitive to change in management.

There is a brilliant and flamboyant yellow splat of lichen that announces very graphically where birds or dogs have 'been'.  It thrives on nitrates and is also very keen on airborne particles of nitrogen compounds that can build up in the nooks and crannies after a period of dry weather.  This can mean that it will grow on small twigs in preference to the main bark of a tree.  Almost all lichen names are in Latin only.  This lichen is called Xanthoria perietina.

I have had a long affection for and interest in the use of concrete because it is so ubiquitous and flexible in how it can be used.  Different surface textures can be designed into it, but it does have a poor reputation based heavily on the green alga that will grow on it as it ages, dulling a once bright surface, making it appear in need of tooth-whitening techniques.  I believe that it may be possible for us to design in ways to make this work.  In the 1980s there was a short fashion for architects to design their wooden cladding in office atria and the 'reconstructed stone' effect of the buildings' exterior to tie together.  Since this poncy name is basically concrete when used in a fine grain form it is very interesting that the inevitable streaking of the surface came to reflect the grain of the wooden panels indoors.  Some buildings and walls have had pig slurry or other compounds sprayed onto the walls to encourage rapid colonisation by lichens to mellow their look and imply age and robustness.

I have chosen a few lichens to comment further on:

Cladonia stellaris is an arctic species that doesn't occur anymore in the British Isles.  It is eaten by reindeer and moose, and is a major constituent of reindeer moss.  The relevance for landscape, apart from the utter beauty of its form, of course, is the history of its use for architectural modelling.  It is one of only a few species that were used traditionally in the depiction of trees around buildings.  I used to be able to buy bags of it for my college models.  It was often dyed varying shades of green, which softened the normal crunchiness of the growing organism.

A lichen that gets both lichenologists and members of the public equally excited is Lobaria pulmonaria.  This lichen has been given an English name, Lungwort, in the herbal tradition of health-giving properties showing in the visual form of an organism.  It was considered to be a powerful aid in the treatment of lung disease as a result of its very lung-like characteristics.  It is incredibly sensitive to air pollution and occurs in the best quantities in western Scotland and Ireland.  It does occur in pockets in England and is heavily protected by legislation.  In paintings by Constable of trees at Flatford Mill, he shows it as abundant on their trunks.  It has not been seen in East Anglia since the industrial revolution.

A sibling to Xanthoria parietina is Xanthoria aureola.  This is a coastal species also fond of bird droppings etc, but has a different character and form to its more widespread relative.  It is also more likely to be orange rather than yellow.

Many other lichens have siblings with different localities.  Ramalina farinacea is a widespread lichen often seen growing on twigs or fences. It prefers a good air quality.

Ramalina siliquosa, on the other hand, although with a similar form, is far more fussy.  Not only does it require good air quality, but it really needs that air to be salty and is another lichen with a range that is primarily coastal.  Strangely, it does grow on Wiltshire Sarsen stones, a fact that has not been easy for lichenologists to explain.



And finally....

When picnic tables come towards the end of their useful life it is not everyone who shuns them, by any manner of means.  As they age, their lichen community increases and so does the community of lichenologists who enjoy them.....


as well as having their own way of showing appreciation of paving...the next photograph was taken by Simon Davey on a field visit to the Netherlands.

For further information – the obvious site from which to begin - The British Lichen Society

What's In a Name?

It has become easier and more frequent for individuals to travel in the past 50 years, as air flights have become more affordable and peer-group pressures have increased.  I have benefitted from this myself and have always been amazed by the range and wonder of the plants and culture of new places.  The experience for us, however, is so different to that of the intrepid plant hunters and travellers of the past.  When travelling to the Canary Islands, for example, I was first struck by my surroundings in a surreal sense.  In a warm climate with a friable volcanic soil I felt surrounded by pot plants growing outside.  It felt a bit like an enormous garden centre!  So many of our well-known plants travel almost more than we do and so we can recognise old friends or, more frequently, the genetic cousins of our old friends who have not been bred to show different characteristics to those you find in the wild.  For early travellers they must have looked very much more strange.

As a landscape architecture student I chose to base one of my projects at Wakehurst Place, based obliquely on a small project I had been involved with to investigate the possible site for a new visitor centre.  The undergraduate project, because it was not a real project, took the enormous conceptual leap of placing a large building on the sensitive site, so it was with some wry amusement that I watched the preparations only a few years later for the building of the Millennium seedbank!  I went rather whacky with my concept and got massively tangled up in whirls of time, spirals and the long-standing relationship of Wakehurst with China and plants of Chinese origin.  This also began a long-standing interest in the plants that have been used at different periods in the history of landscape and garden design.  I also dabbled with drawing in a pseudo-Chinese style.  Thankfully the drawing style shifted, but the interest in the history of our use of plants has remained.  This means that I intend to run occasional blogs based upon this, focussing on individual species or themes.

My first choice of plant may seem a strange one.  It is a far from fashionable species at the moment, sadly some of our neighbours have just removed a fine specimen from their garden within the past 6 months.  It is a plant that I have loved since childhood and I believe illustrates many factors that relate to the introduction of any plant, and there is also a special Wakehurst cultivar of it, which is appropriate.  It was also found by a Scotsman, possibly the greatest plant collector af all time, which has to be good news!  He was also strongly connected to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, a major haunt of my childhood.

The plant I have chosen is what I have always known as Pieris forrestii.  It was found by (and named for) a man called George Forrest, from Falkirk.  It can grow to considerable size, as is evident in this specimen that grows at RHS Wisley.  Forrest found the original plant in Yunnan Province in China and brought it back for his sponsor, AK Bulley, who ran Bees Nursery and whose collection is the basis for the Ness Botanic Garden, now part of the University of Liverpool.  It was named Pieris forrestii by RL Harrow in 1914, and then renamed Pieris formosa var. forrestii by Airy Shaw in 1934 after further work had been carried out on the specimen in RBG Edinburgh's herbarium.  It was decided that although its growth style was very different, it was still too closely related to Pieris formosa to be split off from it. The plant often used in cultivation is Pieris formosa var. forrestii 'Wakehurst'.  This cultivar from the early twentieth-century was bred to increase tolerance of frost and to encourage the bright red spring shoots and other characters that made the original plant so attractive.  It became very popular in the middle of the twentieth-century in particular.

China's hillsides remain less well-travelled than many other parts of the world, despite being the source slopes for many thousands of our favourite garden plants, brought home by many of the famous names of plant hunting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.  Many of the plants brought back bear a passing resemblance to their forebears, but have been altered often to quite a degree, with emphasis on size and abundance of flowers in favour of dignity.  Sadly it appears that many rhododendrons and other woody species that share the diverse range of the Pieris family in China and also in the Americas are vulnerable to the new outbreaks of the terrible fungul attacks from Phytophthora ramorum. Inevitably this will reduce further their fashionability, which is a shame because their flamboyance and sense of fun are infectious and inspiring.

An old name for Pieris is Andromeda, which appears to relate to the beauty and form of the flowers they all bear, in mythology Andromeda became a constellation after her death.  This name was a Linnaean one, from which Pieris split in 1834 when Don named Pieris formosa from its previous name of Andromeda formosa, given to it by Wallich in 1820.  There is only one Andromeda left now, a cute little plant called Bog Rosemary in English.  The flower is special, but looks very different to the stellar florets of all Pieris.  All other larger members of Andromeda have been split off into Lyconias, Gaultherias and several more species including Pieris.

The original Andromeda formosa was found by Wallich somewhere in Nepal before he named it in 1820.  Wallich was originally from Copenhagen and started working for the British East India Company in 1814, where he was heavily involved with the Oriental Museum and the Botanic Gardens in Calcutta.  While he was Superintendant of the Botanic Gardens he sent large volumes of plant seed back to England.  Despite the description of the plant in 1820 and the renaming of the genus in 1834, records show Pieris formosa as having entered use as a garden plant only in 1856.  It really does appear that George Forrest's form with its young red shoots was what was needed to make it a fashionable and popular plant nearly 100 years later.

In my childhood I would watch impatiently for those soft red young shoots to start growing.  For me it was the moment when the year took on warmth and promise.  I would relish their apparent optimism and try to borrow some of it.  Even now, as an adult, I look with joy as the leaves start to form.  I do confess that I have always found the flowers a bit of an oddity, but when you look directly at them, their form is compelling and has its own charm.  It is interesting to reflect upon the name 'Pieris'.  David Don (another Scot) who restructured Andromeda in 1834 is considered to have taken as his inspiration for the name the Pierides, the Greek Muses.  It is so tempting to take a lateral shift on this and move across to the idea of the Pierian Spring as in Alexander Pope's “Essay on Criticism”    
   "A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
    Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
    There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
    And drinking largely sobers us again.”
and to have the genus as a spring flowering flamboyant intoxication.

http://www.rbge.org.uk/assets/files/about_us/press_releases_04/George_Forrest_feature.pdf
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JARS/v31n1/v31n1-bell1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Wallich

Physical Resonances

This post is going to stray a tad from the physical 'concept' of the blog into the arena of theory and economic theory at that. This is intended to be a suggestion for further thought and is not based on anything in particular that I have come across from anyone else. If others have noticed the same connections, I am not at all surprised. I am a landscape architect and not an economist, so the thoughts have yet to be tested.

In the year 2000 London's newest bridge across the Thames was opened and promptly closed 3 days later. It was a footbridge and had been designed through a multiple committee process using what appear to have been primarily wheeled traffic models to calculate the forces of weight and wind that were likely to impact upon it. Of course it was a pedestrian bridge and pedestrians don't behave like cars. Useful as it would be to have our own wheels, we have feet and we have rhythm. According to Wikipedia here the first day of opening also coincided with a charity race that meant up to 2,000 people were on the bridge at any one time for most of the day. While not marching like soldiers, people who walk together often share a walking pace and frequency. The bridge started to respond to the resonance of the people walking. The people walking started to respond to the resonance of the bridge and the inevitable happened. The bridge started to bounce.

Quite a few people have had the amazing privelege to walk on overhead walkways in rainforest or jungle environments. These bridges are notorious for their resonance from single foot passengers. This can be quite marked because there are no damping devices possible on such simple structures. On the Millenium Bridge in London it was possible for the damping devices to be placed at intervals across the bridge and when it opened again 2 years later it was possible for large numbers of people to walk across the bridge with no discernible effects and therefore no bringing on of the rhythm that caused feet to fall together and accelerate the bounces.

In our economy we have economic models constructed in a similar way to that of the bridge. They assume the behaviour of the traffic to be consistent at all times, when we as frustrated bystanders know only too well from our own experiences how incredibly vulnerable stock holding is to the effects of the bounces in the market. Intelligence doesn't always work in the markets, fear is a far greater influence. The effect is of course also exaggerated on occasions by the comments made by others who may not have obvious reasons for saying what they do. Confidence works in a way that does seem to me to be remarkably akin to the accelerated bounces on the Millenium Bridge. It would do no harm if models could be built to look at this effect and to see if the parallels could in fact help build a resolution for such a long running problem. I have worked on historic landscapes where the effects of previous economic fallout have affected the layout of veteran trees. One historic park that I can think of has a strange young series of avenues, where the trees are 150 years younger than the design period they belong to. This turns out to be as the result of a benefactor reinstating a predecessors wholescale felling of the site caused by the need to recover funds lost in a large scale economic disaster.

Garlic Futures....

Garlic is being used to treat Horse Chestnut diseases. In the summer of 2009 I read this news announcement in the RHS magazine The Garden and it seemed to be so profoundly surreal I found it intriguing. It is such a hippy concept really! However it is true and it does appear from the trials published on the internet as though some very profound results have been achieved in treating two extreme problems that occur in Horse Chestnuts.

The major problem that triggered the research, which has until last year been carried out in The Netherlands, is a fairly new to Europe but invasive disease called Bleeding Canker. This is a disease caused by bacteria that breed in areas of the trees that traditional treatments cannot reach effectively. The bacteria is called Pseudomonas syringae pv. aesculi. More information is available on the website for the UK partners with the Dutch company Allicin Treecare, JCA Limited: http://www.jcaac.com/conquer.htm where they give details of techniques and photographs of the process. Their product called Allicin is pumped into the lower trunk of the tree and capillary action carries it to the rest of the tree, including the leaves, which apparently take on a garlicky aroma.

Garlic is used for treating humans for a range of fungal conditions and for blood purification and garlic capsules are widely available. It is interesting to cross-refer this post to an earlier one on the methane produced by cows and sheep here, since garlic is to be used as part of the process to curb their emissions!

The second disease that appears to be vulnerable to the Allicin treatment is the more widespread leaf miner (Cameraria ohridella). This is very interesting as it ties in a bit with the use of garlic in cooking which I have personally noticed discourages house-flies. Trees that have had the Allicin treatment in areas suffering from leaf miner attack have kept their leaves, whereas neighbouring trees have lost almost all of their leaves. The photograph that I have used shows leaf miner damage in street trees in Gdansk, Poland.

In Elliot, R & de Paoli, C Kitchen Pharmacy (1991) the authors say that the antiseptic action of garlic is effective against viruses, fungi and bacteria and that Galen called garlic the 'great panacea', which seems to be proving very true at the moment!

While all of this seems to be very positive and is very promising for the look of the greater trees in the landscape, there is a little boding disquiet in my own mind. Trees are very far from a monoculture. The oak tree is the obvious example to use, where whole communities live in the ecosystem of roots to branches. It is already obvious that invasive insects are not keen on the garlic. Is it possible that beneficial or benign insects might also be affronted? Might other organisms also be disturbed? Lichens, the journalists of air pollution, are formed through a symbiotic relationship of fungus and alga that become 'lichenised'. Garlic is being used specifically for its anti-fungal properties. I would like to see some interest taken in the lichens on the treated trees, maybe they could be reporters for the habitat implications? In the UK, Horse Chestnut is not a key substrate for lichens, but it is far from improbable that this technique will be used for other trees under other circumstances and could in future be taken up in tree nurseries. It is a brilliant technique, but the wider implications do need to be considered while it is still young. At the moment it is far from cheap to innoculate a tree. This may not always be the case and as responsible adults it may be important to weigh up several pros against some cons.

Ways of Seeing....

"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." –- Henry Miller
As a child I would dream of travelling the world. It seemed to me that all of the rest of the world was exotic and exciting, it was home that wasn't. Of course it isn't that straightforward, especially when 'in transit', but the largest surprise that I got was completely unexpected. When you travel, you take your feet with you! You can feel the ground firmly beneath your feet as you walk. But what also happens is that your eyes are opened
- to the fact of different objects and different histories
- to the different ways that people lead their lives in their own countries
- to the SAME ways that people can lead their lives is also intriguing
Familiar objects occur in different shapes, yet still perform the same tasks that we expect to see done.

A recent visit to North Africa has opened my eyes to the African continent. I now believe that it is not possible to do anything more profound than visit a country, or continent, to begin to see into its patterns of life. To be truly spurred to investigate its history and culture. As a child I queued with thousands of others to visit the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. It is a fantastic collection, the collection of artefacts from the excavation from the Valley of the Kings and I was enthralled. To see it in Cairo Museum is to experience so much more. For a start it is amongst other less exotic but highly significant objects, and these give it more context. It is also part of Egypt's history and the dustiness of Egypt is important too, despite the reality that there was a smaller Sahara in Tutankhamun's day. Watching Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile has more meaning now because of this short visit and the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the Sudan have taken on more relevance for me when they are shown on the TV.

Other countries also have road signs, to manage traffic, and they can be fascinating. Ireland, for example, has a very small, spoonlike spade on the roadwork signs compared to ours. Istanbul has joined the small number of countries that not only show the length of time that you have to wait at a junction to cross it as a pedestrian, but also traffic lights show how long you have to wait as a driver. Denmark has separate traffic lights for cyclists (I like that idea). The Americas have lorries. Of course. We see them in the movies. But their lorries have noses! Seeing American lorries in reality, is one of the ways to realise that as viewers of multi-national cultural drama or documentaries we can be very unobservant, or block out those things that we don't relate to. Some cultural oddities crop up in particular places. In Riga, Latvia there is a bridge where newly-weds have taken to putting padlocks on the bridge and throwing away the key as a luck charm. Apparently this is now happening in Florence, Italy and also elsewhere in the Baltic states.

One of the features that I look at when travelling is drainage covering. It can be very interesting to notice the creativity that can go into the design of such mundane details. My favourite to date comes from La Serena, near Coquimbo in Chile and is in the form of a seahorse. The design is profoundly practical, simple and elegant. Some countries have simple style designs for the covers, but the interest lies in the scripts employed. Cyrillic in Slavic or Russian countries, Arabic in Arabic speaking countries, or a mix of languages as can happen in mixed language countries such as Turkey or anywhere the covers will have been cast across national borders.

When we start to open our eyes to what is around us when we travel, we start to learn to value the world in which others live. Their histories are different to those we think we know, and we benefit greatly from an understanding of this. A visit to Dover Castle occurred shortly after their recent renovations. One intriguing feature of the day of the visit was the selection of the scent of the wood burnt on an open fire. In the early Middle Ages the knights returning from their time in the east returned with eastern traditions and games as they had experienced them in their own travels, and scented woodburning was one of many that they introduced. Apparently backgammon also came to us via this route. It is not possible for school history lessons or for the TV to teach us everything. It can, when done well, teach us to be interested to learn more. Or life and direct experience can.