Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago? Where have all the flowers gone? – made extinct in these parts by agricultural sprays, changing practices of the drainage board, ignorance about the ‘shy little flowers in hedge and dyke, that hide themselves away’, thundering death from the big wheels and the drive-as-fast-as-you-can-in-the-gutter-boys, and the sometimes newcomers, sometimes indigenous population who can’t let a Lincolnshire wayside be a Lincolnshire wayside but insist on reducing it all to lawn.
Ooh, look, here’s a bit of grass, with other plants in it.
Let’s make it all like a lawn, just because we can.
Ooh, no, we couldn’t possibly use the secateurs and cut that piece of dry stuff back, which is actually waving around and really hindering visibility.
Let’s mow to death all the little flowers that don’t get in anyone’s way, or grew on a dyke-side anyway.
RIP yellow flag irises, cuckoo flowers and pretty silverweed. “Life is all about loss.”
Frances Richardson
Surfleet
