Trolley 884

Trolley 884 was captured at the hill end of the Eclipse car park on the way into town over West Hill. A medium small trolley from the M&S food hall.

Successfully negotiating the new scaffold at the bottom of Station Approach to find a (non-scoring) friend at the entrance to the Ashley Centre.

It was quite late in the afternoon, and M&S had run out of cherries, so I was reduced to foreign cherries from Waitrose. Then, being a hot afternoon, I opted for the short route home via Court Recreation Ground.

Taking in these bags of clothing, on the wall by Schmidt the fancy kitchen people, on the way. What was it doing there? Abandoned on the way to a charity shop? Abandoned after shop lifting? Common or garden litter?

And a bit further round, these fine miniature hollyhocks. I don't recall seeing them so short before, but I have seen more since.

Following the walnut noticed at reference 2, it was also an opportunity to inspect the walnuts near the vets at the corner of Court Recreation Ground. These leave were not quite so big, but were very much the same sort of thing and there were walnuts.

Quite of lot more of them on the next tree along. So why no walnuts on the tree by the footbridge?

Wikipedia does not say anything about the trees being single sexed, while Gemini offers the snap above. I then turn to Zomlefer (previously noticed) who talks of imperfect flowers - flowers with either male or female parts but not both - but usually monoecious trees.

So probing Gemini again, he goes on. Sex and the trees of the walnut family - which goes rather wider than the walnuts we buy in packets - is clearly a complicated business. Perhaps the simplest explanation for the absence of nuts in the footbridge walnut tree is that it is a single tree - with them doing better as mixed groups. One more thing to check next time I take that route.

I resist the temptation to investigate whether some plants of a given species or variety can be monoecious while others are dioecious.

I note that Gemini knew that Zomlefer was a lady - at least that seems more probable to me than a lucky guess.

Home to try the Waitrose cherries from Spain, variety Skeena. They were not quite as dark as the English cherries of the previous day and I liked them rather better for being a bit sharper. A cherry we had come across just once before, at the big Tesco's on the Isle of Wight last year, as noticed at reference 4. Nothing before that. And I did not remember the name from last year, despite having written it down at the time, sometimes an aid to retention.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolleys-882-and-883.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolley-880.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeena_cherry.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-tesco-stack.html. 

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