Trolley 664

Trolley 664 was collected on All Fools' Day from the Kokoro Passage, a small trolley from the M&S food hall. Snapped here with a view down the town end of the passage, looking towards the market square. On of our town's various gyms to the right. Trolley returned to the stack by the doors inside the Ashley Centre.

After which I continued to East Street and headed towards Ewell Village.

Stopping on the way to take a second snap of this plant, growing in a crack at the edge of the sidewalk, just past the creationists' residence, last noticed nine trolleys ago at reference 2.

The flowers are now starting to appear at the top and yesterday evening (Wednesday) Google Images confirmed its previous identification as the greater celandine (Chelidonium majus). Hopefully it will survive until the flowers open and I can be absolutely sure.

While a bit further along, the Wilko trolley last noticed at reference 1 had moved along a couple of hundred metres and crossed the street. With the bending down of the front left hand part of the basket clearly visible in this snap. Where will it turn up next?

On through Ewell Village to Ewell West and then left into Longmead Road where I found that the two young Wellingtonia - which careful readers will remember about - non-scoring as they are young - have been joined by a coastal redwood, a coastal redwood which I at first mistook for an odd sort of yew, planted in an odd sort of place.

Luckily the nursery ticket was still present, identifying it as as coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). No idea (yet) what a plant passport is all about. Maybe something to do with agricultural health and safety, something that we are supposed to be watering down now that we have got shot of those pesky people in Brussels.

For some reason sourced from darkest Somerset, the nursery at reference 3. A place which specialises in trees, particularly from the US and the Far East, as can be seen from reference 4. Never seen such a long list!

A list which is organised alphabetically by binomial name, so two kinds of metasequoia among the 'M's and two kinds of sequoia proper among the 'S's. They say that they grow a lot of their trees from seed - presumably a convenient way of getting trees from foreign parts - so perhaps they have cracked the tricky business of getting sequoia seeds to germinate.

One assumes that they do not go in for the propagation trickery used by the people at reference 5 and one assumes that one cannot propagate sequoias from suckers or cuttings in the way of many of our native trees.

The nursery is in a small village, perhaps more a hamlet, called Curry Mallet, a little to the south of North Curry and on the western edge of the levels which fall away to the east. With the River Exe on the other side of the watershed to the west. A west country version of the fens of north Cambridgeshire. Not far off our route to Exeter and Dartmoor beyond, so maybe we will take a look one day. In the meantime, we puzzle about the connection to Epsom & Ewell council.

PS: the largest coastal redwood that I know near us is the one across the road from Bourne Hall Library, scored in error as Wellingtonia No.7. And I used to pass a smaller one, but still of a decent size, on the Jubilee Way circuit, now abandoned.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/trolley-663.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-655.html.

Reference 3: http://malletcourt.co.uk/contact/.

Reference 4: http://malletcourt.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Mallet-Court-Catalogue-2023-Web-Version.pdf.

Reference 5: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/wellingtonia-7.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/wellingtonia-109.html. Where the error at reference 6 is noted but not struck off.

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