What it’s like: Lush

Dogwalking…
Down beside the church…it’s gorgeouscamomile – we could gather it for infusionsPoppies – the petals make cough mixture.
There is fumatory for skin complaints.
There is malva, for the National Soup of Egypt, or various other places.It is so lush, so many things to harvest.
And the dogs like to eat the grass leaves.
But one cannot count on it.
Too many of the village residents (that’s residents in the male form, I assure you) want to come along with an apparatus on their backs, and hand-pump, and a squirting hose, and spray it all with herbicide.
As though this bounty of nature were stealing nutrients from some crop (where?).
Soon it will be wilted and orange.
I once asked an Important Village Citizen – proprietor of the village’s Old Folks’ Home – he’d just warned me: “Don’t let your dogs eat the grass now. It’s just been sprayed.”
“Why spray the herbacious borders of the road with herbicide? What about the grandchildren who come at the weekends and might want to gather a posy of wildflowers for their grandmas?”
He said, “in a few weeks, it will all be dead anyway.”
Meaning in the drought of summer.
So why not kill it all off now? At the expense of buying herbicide and paying some insufficiently employed village resident to spray it all with poison? Why?

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