Trolleys 686 and 687

Captured in the Kokoro Passage on my way into town yesterday. A small trolley from the M&S food hall and a medium sized trolley from Waitrose. Being of two sizes, I took two trips to return them and so score two.

The busy plants in the planters a bit further down the passage have now declared themselves to be poppies. This despite all the talk of rocket, most recently at reference 2.

With the next planter along not being quite as advanced, but showing the distinctive drooping flower bud.

Which all goes to show that amateur identification of herbaceous plants - that is to say not trees, bushes or cacti - is a tricky business in the absence of flowers.

The next confusion was registered in Wetherspoon's, where I thought that my 250ml glass of red looked rather bigger than that. Closer inspection suggested that they were actually half pint glasses intended for lager, that is to say 284.1ml. Eventually the brain clicked into gear and I remembered that the usual form is to fill a beer glass to the brim and that this probably was 250ml after all. Perhaps being in this particular sort of glass makes it look more.

Back up the hill to check up on the fallen section of heritage wall along the top of Pound Lane. No change there since last reported at reference 3.

But there was some change at the posts planted along the bottom of Meadway in that they have started to sprout. I now think that they are hazel posts put in the ground while they were still fresh. I remember that when I was an allotment holder, I used to like posts which sprouted on the grounds that they were likely to wear better than dead posts. A belief encouraged by the posts of Robinson Crusoe's island stockade sprouting and knitting together nicely over over the years - the only catch there being that I have no idea if Defoe knew anything about gardening.

Reference 3 also, as it happens, includes first notice of these posts.

This evening, the next step was to go back to Google Images, which had been reasonably confident about the poppies, in the absence of buds or flowers, being some species of rocket or arugula, perhaps Eruca vesicaria subspecies sativa. The stuff you get in the better class of restaurants. BH, I might say, was not so sure. For which see reference 4.

I offered him the second of the two snaps above and he got into a muddle, with neither rocket or poppy making the cut. But I offer him the first snap and it is poppy all the way, almost certainly one of the 50 or more species in the Papaver genus, the type genus of the poppy family (Papaveraceae). Quite possibly the common poppy (Papaver rhoeas). Which all goes to show that Google Images is more comfortable with the flowers of flowering plants than with the plants, just like us.

I did think that I might ask Gemini what he made of all this, but that will have to wait for another day.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/trolley-685.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/trolley-681.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/spoons.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/trolley-672.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver.

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