Tree Fern and Elections

I took this from the upper floor of a double-decker bus, hence the weird downward angle. This little shop is apparently a combination of Dollar Store (or Pound Shop) and Bed, Bath and Beyond. You can get men's socks for £1, Colgate toothpaste for £1, a bath mat for £1. The proprietor in the doorway looks like he's keeping an eye on the man in the green sweatshirt at far right. I imagine people steal stuff from those bins.

Why was I on a double-decker bus? Well, when I left the library job in mid-April, some co-workers gave me a gardening gift certificate that can be redeemed at various garden centers around the country. The closest one to us is a posh little place in Maida Vale. So I headed down there to see what I could get with my gift card.

I got several annuals, like petunias for a hanging basket and a little clump of mixed annuals for a pot on our front porch. I also got the geranium above, even though I really don't need another geranium. Isn't it an amazing color? (There was already a valerian growing in this pot, so I put the geranium next to it!)

The big purchase, though, was a pot for our tree fern. We repotted it just three years ago, and yet I was pretty sure it was rootbound once again. I'd put some bluebell bulbs around it that have never done well, and this spring I tried to take them out and replant them elsewhere, but I literally could not dig them out of the soil because the fern has so many dense roots.

So I got a huge pot, as well as some compost, and called an Uber, and then the pot wouldn't fit in the Uber, so I had to pay an £8 cancellation fee (!) and call an even bigger Uber XL, and all of that was a headache but I finally got the pot home.

And sure enough, when I tried yesterday, I couldn't get the tree fern out of its old pot. I pushed and pulled but that root ball was so tight that I eventually had to break the pot, which was heartbreaking because it was a really nice terra cotta vessel that we could have used for something else. (I remembered when we last repotted the tree fern, we had to cut its plastic pot off because it was similarly jammed up.)

Here's the tree fern, standing on its own tightly packed root ball. You can see how dense those roots are.

And here it is in its new home, able to breathe easier! I still couldn't get the bluebells out, so they moved with the fern.

Dave had argued for putting it in the ground, but I just don't know where we'd put it. We don't really have a place in the garden for such a big plant that likes shade and dampness. So it's staying on the patio.

This was my other big excitement yesterday -- voting in my first UK election! We were electing local councillors, not national offices, but the results of these elections are being weighed to judge political power nationally. The results are still coming out, but it looks bad for Keir Starmer and Labour and good (unfortunately) for Nigel Farage and Reform.

I voted for the three Lib Dem candidates in my area. I've always liked the Lib Dems and they campaigned tirelessly here. I even had one come to my door, which surprised me. No Labour or Conservative council candidates came to my door. We're still awaiting results so I don't know yet who won.

Voting in England, at least in my area, is very old-school. We do have to present a photo ID, and then we're given a ballot and a pencil. The ballot lists the candidates with a box next to each name, and we mark an X next to the candidates we choose. No computers, no punch cards, no touch screens. Then we pop the ballot into a ballot box and that's that.

I asked the seated man above, who was checking our registrations, whether it was OK to take a picture of the polling station. "I don't know -- no one's ever asked me that," he said, laughing. I told him it was my first time voting so I wanted it for posterity, and promised to take it from a discreet distance.

Dave is also eligible to vote but he wasn't feeling well yesterday so he didn't. (He said he didn't know who to vote for in any case.) He's staying home from work today, too. He's due to start some new Crohn's medication later this month but everything moves at a snail's pace with the NHS, so meanwhile, he's metaphorically limping along.