The first Velvet Underground song I ever heard was Beginning to See the Light, played on the John Peel show around 1977. In it, Lou Reed babbles exuberantly about ‘Wine in the morning/And some breakfast at night’. Having a cooked breakfast washed down with a pint of IPA in a Wetherspoons pub at 9.30 in the morning in the middle of Staffordshire may not have quite the same transgressive poetry, but it was a heartily decadent way to start a walk (and refreshing after some wet and dysfunctional public transport.)

The Wetherspoons chain (large pubs sited in converted buildings of various kinds) is interesting. The combination of their hugeness, cheapness, decor and range means that any given one can combine the roles of pub, cafe, restaurant, Darby and Joan club, sports bar, perpetual beer festival, tramps’ hostel and unofficial branch of social services, often without any obvious clash. This one had been converted from a Post Office and maintained its role as a communications hub by offering free wifi.

After re-buying the map I had forgotten to bring I left Stone along the canalside. Almost immediately the weather started to improve. Under the bridge someone had written WHIT POWER, suggesting (considered alongside last week’s poor-quality swastika) that today’s crytpofascists live under bridges, like trolls, thereby failing to benefit from the education system. I photographed this instead:

…love hearts left on display but the accompanying names painted out by officialdom; their policy must be ‘love all you want, but never define the object’.

Much pleasant walking along the canal, adding to the many miles of tow path I have done so far.

I left the canal at Burston, and joined a little-frequented path.

The weather threatened rain (’It’s a twister, Aunty Em!’)

but it was bright again for a few miles of quiet lanes.

I entered Stafford via a large, open common

then a road passing an industrial estate.

The final stretch into the own centre passed the kind of specialist shops that have somehow escaped being replaced with out-of-town or town-centre operations: fireplaces, cake icing, tattooists. And a large prison.

In Stafford I sought out an end-of-walk drink (partly as self-invented tradition and partly to justify this post title.) Signs pointed to a beer festival in a theatre, and I thought ‘why not?’ The first Stafford real ale festival for a number of years, it focused on local brews procured within a 30-mile radius. I had a half of Slaters Common Road Bitter, named after the road I had just walked down - food miles <1. Then something else that tasted like nettles fermented in a training shoe. And (foreshadowing a later leg) some nice beer from a pub in Netherton.

After that I wandered back through Stafford to the station, and considered the walk concluded.

All the pictures

It occurred to me that, by adding ’spurs’ on to a couple of bits of the walk I’ve already done, and when the time comes navigating to a particular site in Warwickshire, I could join up Edge Hill (the University) with Edge Hill (the Liverpool district) and Edge Hill (the Civil War battleground.)

With this in mind, I walked from my house (which is on the Southport to Brighton route) to the University (as I do many times each year to go to work and earn a living.)

There are pictures here. Our home is in a standard suburban street, spookily similar to the one I was brought up in.

(In 1974 a dog jumped in the garden of one of these houses, a moment I know through the random ghost magic of Flickr.)

I walked through a park, which has some municipal wildness

and a bandstand that for some reason reminds me of workaday American small towns, perhaps because there’s a bandstand in the film Groundhog Day

I passed Morrisons

where someone had left this flower

walked down St Helens Road and entered the University campus, where trees dating from the 1930s surround new buildings

and the architecture has created miniature Zen gardens, such as this little area, where leaves have been massaged by the captive wind into a temporary heart shape.

It seemed simple enough: I would finish my walk to Stone, Jennie would pick me up, we would stay at a service station, then drive to our friend Sharon’s ‘Ordination as a Priest’ on the Sunday morning. In practice it wasn’t quite that simple. We stayed at Stafford South Services (which I had hoped to walk to, thinking that arriving at a motorway services on foot would give me a frisson of perversity, but there appears to be no way to do this.) Got up early and set off, aiming to reach Coventry Cathedral for 10. However, our exhaust pipe fell off just before the junction of the M6 and the M6 Toll Road and we had a new home for a while…

We waited there for an hour, finding little to amuse. The place seems to have a specific name (M6 B 209.4) and there was a carton of Malaysian fruit juice among the assorted dejecta of the verge.

We were towed away (cheers, Tony from Direct Recovery) and, by 11, found ourselves at Wolverhampton Kwik Fit rather than Koventry Kathedral. This was odd and unexpected, as we both used to work in eyeshot of the particular garage and it is territory I hope to cover on my walk. (On the way we drove past a crowd gathered to watch the demolition of the Goodyear Chimney, reminding me of the destruction of the iconic Shoreham Power Station chimney a few years ago.)

We got the train to Leamington, and managed to get to Sharon’s church where a nice lunch was served, some kosmic kids’ art was on the walls, and general grace abounded.

Will try and include Emscote in the route next year some time and until then, if I can,  stay ‘in joy and simplicity of heart’ as was said in the (church) service.

We drove to Keele, listening to a programme about Bob Dylan (with Lenny Henry struggling to discover what all the fuss is about), which led me to force Jennie to listen to my favourite Dylan track Idiot Wind: ‘blowing every time you move your mouth, Blowing down the backroads headin’ south.’ Which we were.

Jennie dropped me of in Keele village, and I resumed walking vaguely towards Brighton. First of all I wandered through the university campus. I had expected my ‘marketing mind’ to kick in, evaluating USPs and other quanta of desire, but I never really felt I’d arrived at the actual university. Some of it seemed almost abandoned, though the some of the older buildings were attractive, leading to a fantasy of romanticised students playing Secret/Midnight Garden games on moonlit lawns.

Then I was walking out down a treelined avenue, through some woods right alongside the motorway, and under the M6.

I passed some forbidding farm buildings, then followed an overgrown path to a short and scary stretch of A-road. (Perhaps not surprising that the path was overgrown as it only leads to a bend where hurtling death-machines accelerate towards you, with nowhere to retreat except hedges that springily force one outwards…)

But this brought me to a road with a cool name (adorned with sadly deflated balloons):

From there I walked through Swynnerton Old Park and Hanchurch Heath, experiencing major deja vu - I’m convinced that J and I walked here, back in the mid-90s when we did such things, perhaps in a route from a magazine.

Here I found a sign about woodland donated by Lord Stafford for the ‘perpetual enjoyment’ of the people, a nice concept, like perpetual motion. I contributed my share of enjoyment, got slightly lost, found another overgrown pathway which led to a filed of head-high rape. I detoured around this, and eventually recrossed the motorway, three hours after first crossing it (having made a journey that would be a few heedless minutes on the motorway itself.)

I marched along beside pylons for a while, then traversed the A34 near Tittensor, fortunately with less traffic danger. The wide grassy central reservation reminded me of a story by Gene Wolfe titled (I think) ‘Three Million Square Miles’, which I read in an anthology of SF stories on environmental themes called ‘Ruins of Earth’ back in the 70s. In the story as I remember it, the protagonist searches for the vast tracts of land in the US that are simply unaccounted for, and realises that they are comprised of tiny anonymous bits of territory, odd parcels of space that don’t have a real identity or purpose, but are simply there.

I met up briefly with Jen at Barlaston, having snapped some killer material for her Democracy and Proper Drains blog. However the charms of Barlaston failed to lure us in, and I continued on alongside the Trent and Mersey canal.

(If the sprayer of this graffiti wished to denote sympathy with the Thule-Gesellschaft, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or other historical unpleasantness they have botched the job by drawing it the wrong way round. Still, my advice would be don’t bother having another it’s not big and it’s not clever, fool.)

After a while it became another pleasant canalside walk. Strange sounds; a distant, invisible fairground and the bass hum of an electrical installation. A Virgin train sped past, on a route I have whizzed along many times, without observing this stretch of water, this place in all its particularness.

The approach to Stone was gentle. Some new buildings offereing a ‘marketing suite’ made me feel at home (my marketing receptors sated at last.)

I finished off with a drink at the Swan, a nice pub with real-ale selection that is, according to its MySpace page, aged 47 and male.

All pictures from this leg

Start 53.005288, -2.289468
Finish 52.899530, -2.146720

13.4 miles of Staffordshire loveliness

28 June 2008

Reading a leaflet in a motel on the way back from holiday, I noticed that we were in Hadrian’s Wall Country – a set of Roman-linked places stretching from coast to coast, presented to enhance tourism. I wonder of these ‘countries’ have borders and checkpoints - ‘You are now leaving Hadrian’s Wall Country and entering Herriot Country‘; or ‘Please remember to change your money before entering Beatrix Potter Country.’ Perhaps they behave like real countries - expansionist Bronte Country annexing tearooms and gift shops from Catherine Cookson Country; the Emmerdale/Phinn Alliance severing trade links with Miss Read Land, thus creating a doily mountain and clotted cream lake.

Many ‘countries’ (and a few Trails) seem to be based on authors, which seems to reduce their work to its picturesque aspects – I doubt if the guide-writers and tour-operators who have created ‘Hardy Country’ expect visitors to sell their wives, kill their husbands and die in despair, for instance. (Perhaps the nasty bits happen offstage, in Hardy’s imaginary Wessex.)

Like the Star Trek universe or the Wild West, these are virtual/fictional spaces that large numbers of people enjoy revisiting - overlaid on to real places.

Which ones might I pass through when I resume my Southport-to-Brighton journey? It would be great to see brown tourism signs around Shepperton, welcoming one to J G Ballard country, though these could legitimately be erected all over the place, pointing the way to any car showroom, shopping mall or gated community.

Brighton could be part of an international Graham Greene Country I guess, or maybe the alcoholic gloom of Patrick Hamilton Country could be a good draw. I’ll be writing to the relevant tourist authority to suggest that brown signs on the borders of Portslade and Southwick give a cheery welcome to Attila the Stockbrocker Country…

Leaving Loch Carron, we relocated to Millside Cottage in Blair Atholl, a supremely comfortable cottage in a pleasant village. We stayed here last year and were initially disappointed that it wasn’t more remote, but its many charms won us over – being next to a small train station provides a kind of evocative rhythm; the village is friendly and offers all amenities; the showers have demigod-power levels and tree-covered hills fill our field of vision.

On the way, we visited the Highland Folk Museum, a well-run outdoor history museum, though Jennie’s praising comment that they could ‘take the Sussex Weald and Downland Museum in a fight’ went over the head of the ticket lady (unless her poker face hid a guilty secret, and the WADM lies in smoking ruins even as we speak.)

Along the way I acquired another paper box of poetry: Soirbheas/Fair Wind by Meg Bateman, a gaelic collection with English translations – more troubling beauty. Then a brief stop at the House of Bruar, a sort of Highland Harrods, unexpected after mile the desolate beauty of the long drive through Glen Garry: plenty of luxury tea and artisan fudge, precisely calibrated (smoked/organic/wild etc) morsels for inconceivably discerning pallets.

Settled in to the idyllic Millside.

One day I walked up the back of the house, onto the ridge that overlooks the village, thinking: I’m not used to continuous pleasure. Perhaps I should find a chemist – plead that I’m an anhedonic who has lost his prescription – get a modest supply of misery capsules. However hauling myself up a steep hill, panting and faint, looking back at Blair castle gleaming white in the rain-cleaned air, brought me back to steady-state, with just enough hardship to allow some joy.

Later I explored Blair Atholl’s two bars, preferring the hotel serving Moulin’s four local ales (food miles x6), with its ‘local’s entrance’, friendly staff and dark privacy.

The next day, I got my wish for a dosage o’ misery, in the form of the onset of some kind of virus (cold/sickness). This kept us indoors but enabled me to finish a few books I had started With fuel shortages a distinct possibility, we’ve planned to use the nearby station to good effect, by making day trips on the train…

In one of the books I finished (Pattern Recognition by William Gibson), the American protagonist experiences London as a ‘mirror world’, superficially similar to home but with an accumulation of tiny differences (three-pin plugs, triangular sandwich boxes etc.) reminding her that no, it’s a different place. Scotland has some of this quality for me, except that the differences are mainly that things are better. For instance, the unattended station in Blair Atholl is immaculate, well-decorated and has a small waiting room. The train was on time, clean, modern and had sufficient carriages. The dismal equivalents in England, on the other hand, don’t bear thinking about.

We went to Perth, where I stumbled along feeling like a 90-year old (through the lens of my man-flu.) The ‘Scottish colourist’ works in the J.D.Fergusson Gallery cut through the fug – decades-old moments alive in the rhythm of pigment.

Getting back, we had tea in the watermill beside which our Millside Cottage is built – still a mill as it has been for centuries, now grinding coffee and tourism alongside bread and oats.

A trip to the next town of Pitlochry, which has become a bit of an enormous tourist shop, but with some good places like the whisky shop which introduced us to a useful spectrum of flavours. The dam and fish ladder are impressive, looking like a film set for a thriller of some kind

(perhaps a Bond story with a villain planning to interfere with the migration patterns of salmon.) We ate at the Old Armoury (which was great) and saw an energetic production of She Stoops to Conquer at the industrious and well-run Pitlochry Festival Theatre. I had never seen this bawdy comedy, even though the expression ‘You would be for running away by night, without knowing one inch of the way’ is part of Jennie’s regular vocabulary.

We finally made it to Edinburgh on Friday (having planned to go on Monday.) The train journey started and ended mere yards from our doorstep, and had spectacular moments including crossing the Firth of Forth. We descended on Transreal Fiction in the spirit of fur trappers encountering civilisation at a once-a-year rendezvous, acquiring a bucketload of SF books, and meeting a famous tapir (pictured, foreground.)

And that was just about it. Leaving the cottage was painful, though learning its history from the next-door neighbour who talked to us as we loaded up (it was originally two railway cottages, built in 1900, and his wife was born in one of them) was oddly comforting. On the way back we stopped at Doune Castle

and Dunblane Cathedral.

Our last moments in Scotland, Europe’s last civilised country, were spent in Primo Coffee at Gretna Green services, watching rain fall outside orange walls and planning next year’s return trip.

Nothing to do with my walk to Brighton, in fact a journey in the opposite direction: our annual holiday in Scotland.

For the first week we stayed in a cottage at Attadale by Loch Carron, surrounded by hills, observed incuriously by highland cattle.

One perk of staying in their holiday cottages is the opportunity to explore the grounds out of hours. We wandered through the artist-friendly gardens on a blazing evening, saw the first glimpse of Skye at the end of the loch, discovered a Japanese garden and had a mono no aware moment, finding two petals on a cast-iron bench in the Old Rhododendron Glade.

Another nature-meets-art moment: finding alpine strawberries growing in this piece of hillside, carved with the legend LIFE IS NOT A REHEARSAL by artist Graciela Ainsworth.

This reminded me of something I read at school – a man fleeing tigers, dangling from a cliff, death above, death below – sees a strawberry growing from the cliff and eats it - ineffable sweetness. (Fuller version here.)

(As it happens there was a sculpture of a cheetah nearby suggesting that the cliff+wild strawberry+carnivorous cat combo may be a repeating pattern in the warp and weft of things.)

Other trips made while we holed up at Attadale, in log-stove/DVD/malt whisky comfort:

Across the nearby bridge to Skye on a dramatic, lowering day; grey hills streaked with waterfalls, reminding me of Gary Snyder’s ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End’. It’s all in flow, it’s just that the water flows faster than the stone.

Out to Ullapool; breakfast in the excellent Tea Store

(Ullapool has a fine bookshop, where I looked for new Scottish poetry; bought three volumes from Two Ravens Press who are actually based in the town: Kevin Williamson, Dorothy Baird, Larry Butler. A hat trick. I found these diverse works troubling an rewarding in equal measure. Result!)

Inverewe Garden, visited now for the third time, always on aspic days like this, though never before with such concerted midge attacks. Skin So Soft, invented by Avon from Blakes 7, does indeed help repel them and, as a side effect, is giving me the aged suppleness of a lady’s glove.

Revisiting the Old Inn at Gairloch – which was nice as always, though the food wasn’t as good as we remembered; perhaps their continuing popularity and numerous awards are making them complacent. By contrast, a meal the next day at the Potting Shed at Applecross was fantastic – local produce prepared thoughtfully but unfussily. The Potting Shed is based in an attractive walled garden combining raised beds, colours that blazed in the odd moment of sun, and wild corners.

I finished the new James Bond book that morning, and found Sebastian Faulks’ effort better than the critical slatings had suggested (certainly a better pastiche than the Amis, Gardner, Benson and Higson ones, with the 1960s setting a lot more interesting than the timeless present of many of the franchise versions.) Bond-like driving skills were needed as we crossed Bealach na Bà, a switchback pass dropping from 2035ft in a sphincter-tightening, brake-burningly short space of time. Despite a fear of high, exposed places and blind corners, Jennie managed very well, hanging grimly on to the steering wheel – literally a white-knuckle ride. At one moment it looked as if we would simply stop, in which case I suppose we would have had to stay on the hills, preying on travelers like Sawney Bean and family.

A slow day followed, with a trip to Plockton. This place may well be an ‘unbelievably picturesque village’ (Rough Guide to Scotland 2006), but on this day it exuded misery and distaste for visitors, through the maws of its ‘gift shops’, ’studios’ and the like (the obvious nodes of antipathy to tourism.) Clearly the winding road had deposited us in the evil mirror-universe version of the ‘chocolate-box row of neatly painted cottages ranged around the curve of a tiny harbour’, or perhaps in a time-bubble, doomed to recycle an inhospitable moment for eternity.

Moving on swiftly, we enjoyed a restorative meal and input of humanity from the good folks at the Carron Restaurant

…and then our Loch Carron time was over.

More holiday linkathon to follow…

…and here’s all the pictures.

We started the day in the AromA Cafe, a bright, modern, angular place very different from the slightly ramshackle and homely Cheshire Ice Cream Farm where we kicked off last week. The guy behind the counter had a luxuriant blond Van Dyke, like a young Custer or Rupert of of Hentzau; I didn’t know whether to pay him or challenge him to a duel. My chai latte was sickly and nice, probably as good as you’ll get outside of a battered tin cup in a KL market; Jen’s toast was disappointingly fancy.

We realised that the building used to be the Lamb, a vast and decaying pub we stayed in some years ago. A coaching house with a long history, its current fate is to be transmuted into apartments and this breezy cafe. Emerging, I noticed that there’s a Costa in the same block, and several other cafes within eyeshot: for a moment Nantwich seemed like a brick heart pumping coffee. Perhaps a resurrected Hogarth could etch a Caffeine Boulevard to accompany his Beer Street (below) and Gin Lane - a slightly manic thoroughfare awash with febrile energy, citizens racing wide-eyed in a thousand futile directions; a street now running through every town centre in the land.

I set off, past the church (coffee available) and out, quickly finding a footpath between houses and a school that took me to a wooded nature reserve.

I saw no other walkers for the next six hours. Often I found myself in lush meadows, seemingly undisturbed, surrounded by woodland.

Never far from roads and farms, I seemed to be on a forgotten trail, finding things like this sculpture-like dead tree with just miles of breeze and sun for company.

I stopped for a drink at Wybunbury, a pleasant-looking village whose church is split, with the (new) church at one end and the (old) tower at the other. In between is the Swan, a Robinson’s pub. I scanned the pumps, calculating ABV, time of day, temperature, distance remaining, likelihood of further pub stops, novelty value of trying new beer, poetics of the names, appeal of the different styles (etc) with the quick reptile mind of a professional gambler. This moment of supercomputing led me to order a pint of ‘Dizzy Blond’, from the blond barmaid – post-feminist irony saw us through this moment of potential difficulty. It was a nice pint, in a ‘like lager but don’t worry, it’s real ale’ kind of way.

I moved on through more lush meadows. Falling blossom filled the air. It was pleasant. I don’t know if there’s a God, but my speck of consciousness felt in tune with a beneficent reality for some moments.

As I’ve said before, Cheshire are good at signing, and the cheerful little yellow arrows can usually be spotted on the far side of fields, even with my 2D eyes (and with many other yellow dots around, buttercups and dandelions.)

However, on less frequented routes, the indifference or hostility of landowners can make navigation difficult. In this case, the yellow arrows had disappeared from some stiles; electric cattle wires cut across the route; unmarked paths led to fields of frisky bullocks. I lost patience when an electric wire sliced across a the top of a stile – let’s just say I adjusted the arrangement.

(I do realise that these wires aren’t deadly. When I was nine or ten, we had a farm holiday in Gloucestershire. The only other child was a girl called either Nicola or Tania Cream (one of the few people who can play the ‘What’s your pornstar name?‘ game and arrive at a less raunchy-sounding one.) We ran around the farm, climbed haystacks, chased sheep and dared each other to hold the wires. As I remember it’s not much worse than licking the terminals of small battery… I also know, despite being a total townie, that bullocks aren’t fanatical death-machines, but in my old age a field full of curious, large young creatures running towards me is a bit much.)

Some woodland cooled me down in every sense. End-of-season ramsoms and bluebells populated the shade. After a while I crossed the M6 on a bridlepath, enjoying the strangeness of encountering the motorway I’ve been on dozens, maybe hundreds of times from a new angle.

Jennie was waiting for me in Keele. We had to get going quite quickly, so a proper look at Keele will have to wait for next time – which will probably be late June or early July.

So I’ve finally got on to a different map, into a different county that I know little of: ‘the creative county’ according to some roadsigns. OK then: create me, baby…

]]> http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/the-yellow-sign-nantwich-to-keele/feed/ walkinghometo50 aroma hogarth http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/meanwhile-in-scotland/ http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/meanwhile-in-scotland/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 10:45:59 +0000 walkinghometo50 http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/?p=59

Received a missive from my old pal Ian Smith:

Just read some of your walking stuff, thought I would mention that as
another fictitious character (Prof. Ralph Deeson), I recently unveiled a
mystical stone for the Forestry Commission (one of seven) and gave a
lecture, and launched a book that I didn’t write (my mate did) which can be
downloaded from their site. The sort of hokum faux mythology you might like.

Indeed I do - and they’re in a great part of the world too. We’ve had a few holidays in Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders, and have always thought all that has been missing has been mysterious inscribed stones. At last the gap has been plugged.

I’m not sure if Ian now views me as a fictitious character, or if he means that Professor Ralph Deeson is an addition to his roster of made-up personae.

More like a professor than an actual Professor

Ian will be doing some work in these parts (and in fact on a portion of my walking route) this summer:
“an international collaboration called ‘The Hope Street Market’ - linking Liverpool’s two Cathedrals with an avenue of ridiculous market stalls and streetlife selling optimism, dreams and good humour.”

Mmmmm - market.

After the (non) camping debacle, I’ve decided to resume the walk from an earlier point, abandoning North Shropshire in favour of a route through Cheshire into Staffs. The ‘blue remembered hills’ will have to remain as mere memories, the spur down to Whitchurch written off as a dead end, Shropshire conceded as an unassailable Eastern Front (the overextended supply lines, the beastly winters, the fierce partisans attacking without warning and melting into the tree line…)

For the first time I had lifts at either end and some company during breaks, thanks to Jennie. I picked the Cheshire Ice Cream Farm as the ‘restore point’, thinking that a second breakfast would be a good way to start. This second visit was very enjoyable, eating a crisp bacon sandwich surrounded by cyclists bringing a blizzard of logos.

And then walking again, along lush green lanes towards Beeston Castle.

After a brief pitstop with Jen, I headed down the hill towards the canal. For a few hundred yards I walked along the A49 (actually going north, thanks to the vagaries of navigation) - a road we have driven countless times, where I once received a job offer. Perhaps this revised route is truer to the spirit of the walk: treading the lines of travel made many times at speed in cars and trains.

The Beeston Castle Hotel was just open, so I nipped in for a half, finding it a pleasant place with a proper public bar.

Then I was back on the Shropshire Union Canal heading for Nantwich. This section travels through some lush countryside - today, lined with the white may blossom and cow parsley, it was a it like walking through clouds.

The canal weaves in and out of the A51. At one point a desire path led up a bank towards a Texaco garage - just the kind of place I needed last month on the way to Whitchurch, aka the Place of Dead Roads.

Stopped for a drink at the Barbridge Inn. I nearly shunned this place, with its Carling umbrellas and plastic treehouse, but it was quite nice. Jennie photographed me hiding from the Vitamin D, and I photographed myself in a blank sign / glue art exhibit.

(Another pub nearby was advertising a band called Beardsmith, which I imagined as a sort of British, greasier version of ZZ Top - but it’s actually the family name of a group with no facial hair to speak of.)

Then more quiet miles to Nantwich.

I was sorry to leave the canal, but glad to end up back on the public transport grid, ready for future trips, glad to see Jennie in our blue car. Interwoven journeys.

I saw a lot of dandelions today. At home I battle these plants with various ecocidal (and ineffectual) devices. I wonder why we don’t welcome them, the way the Japanese welcome the annual blazing wave of cherry blossom sweeping their islands: welcome the brightness of the flowers, the fantastic structure of the seedheads, the bounty of the edible leaves and roots, the inspiring example of their persistence and hardiness.

All photos from this stretch