Imaginary taxonomies

I think I have nothing to say, so I say nothing
Lines are the names of cryptic species in imaginary taxonomies
ornus, or as the pinax more peculiarly, fraxinus bubula

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Psychogeog round Bevendean,Brighton, UK

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Yesterday in the August rain Jeremy Linden and I went to Meadowview in Bevendean on the eastern outskirts of the city of Brighton and, starting from map ref TQ33220608, we walked eastwards along a corridor of the Bevendean Down Local Nature Reserve (below) to the Race Hill footpath. Here we turned south and then up the hill past the race horses to the summit with its magnificent views across Brighton and the racecourse to the sea.  Close to the top of Race Hill on an unmade cul-de-sac is an isolated row of terrace houses called Bellevue Cottages built in the mid- to late 19th century. On the side wall of the blue cottage the owner had painted some impressive zodiacal devices.   After Bellevue we made the long trek down Bear Road with the cemetery wall on the right and open fields on the left, but much traffic in between.  At Bevendean Road we turned north and explored the Tenantry Estate - all new houses and turfed grassland built on the former Bevendean Hospital a...
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Cynthia died on 22nd April 2019, an Easter Bank Holiday Monday.  She passed away peacefully in bed at her home in South View with her poor arthritic hands rested gently on her diaphragm like a dormouse that had gone to sleep lying on its back.  She was very white and still after all the previous days of pain and struggle. Outside her window the morello cherry flowers were at their snowy best and the camellias were thick with pink and red blossoms in the garden that she loved.  In the wood beyond the bank where the soft shield-fern grows the bluebells had produced their annual magic under the great oak to which she had a swing fixed when she was a child.  I once wrote to her from Alice Springs that one of the things I missed most was "the translucent green of the bluebell woods in spring".  How often she quoted that phrase back to me.  But now, after 62 years together, she is gone and will rest in the Precious Field part of Sedlescombe churchyard among the...
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