Green Alkanet

Anita took her morning coffee outside and sat on the somewhat rickety old wooden bench in the sun. The bench had been bequeathed to her by the previous owners. Anita thought that if they had tried to move it, it would have fallen apart. She fully intended to replace it with a shiny new bench of her own one of these days. She’d already scrolled through a number of websites and was quite taken by the ones made from recycled plastic which would not rot as this one had.

Sitting there in the spring sunshine she surveyed the garden. Her first spring here. She’d moved in just after Christmas and just before Lockdown put a temporary halt to all house moves. Recently retired, Anita wanted a bigger garden than the back yard of her small Victorian terrace, so she’d moved a little further out of town to this dormer bungalow with a good-sized back garden. Having viewed the house in late summer she’d never seen its spring colours before. There had been purple crocuses in the grass under the cherry tree with its pale pink blossom, which startled her into thinking snow had fallen one April night when she woke up to its petals covering the lawn. Next door’s forsythia had grown taller than the fence, its yellow blossoms putting her few sad looking daffodils to shame. They need digging up and the bulbs separating – on Anita’s to do list. Her plan was to create a vegetable plot at the far end of the garden where the back gate led onto an old railway track, now a popular cycling and dog walking route. This was the spot that Anita sat looking at now, over her coffee. She’d spent an entire day last week trying to dig up the green alkanet that had suddenly appeared there. It seemed that it had seeped in from the other side of the fence rather than having been deliberately put there. After she’d spent several hours trying to dig it up, roots and all, her neighbour had popped his head over the fence.

“Good luck with that,” he’d said. “I tried to get rid of mine for years, but I’ve learned to enjoy it now and just keep it contained as much as possible.”

Anita had given up at that point and just picked some of the bright blue flowers to garnish her salad at dinner. “At least if I eat the flowers,” she thought, “they can’t produce more seeds.” Further Googling showed it spread through the roots as much as the seeds. It’s not ‘native’ to the UK but was introduced in the 17^th century. A time of colonisation and empire building when white men moved plants and animals around the world causing all kinds of anomalies in the present. There are worse ‘aliens’ to have in the garden Anita knew, such as Japanese knotweed or giant hogweed. Green alkanet hasn’t come from quite so far as Japan though, as it is indigenous to south west Europe, so Google informs her, and was probably brought to the UK as a dye rather than an attractive garden plant for bourgeoisie plant collectors.

Finishing her coffee, Anita placed the Cornish blue striped mug on the ground by the bench and walked across the daisy covered lawn to the bottom of the garden. The green alkanet was abuzz with bees. “Well, that’s nice to know,” she thought, “at least it’ll bring in the pollinators for my tomatoes and courgettes.” Even aliens can have positive benefits! Anita’s thoughts turned to other aliens or ‘non-natives’, like her parents who had moved here from Kenya when it turned out the Asian ‘aliens’ were no longer welcome there. Her grandparents had made two intercontinental moves in their lifetimes – from Gujarat to Kenya, and from there to the UK. Anita had worked in the States for a couple of years but she had never lived anywhere very different from the UK since being a small child and had never even visited India. She’d lived in big cities all her life and had never felt discriminated against at school or at work. She mostly forgot that some people viewed her as ‘different’, or ‘alien’. She reflected on that now as she recalled the incident, if indeed it could even be described as such, on her walk back from the local supermarket yesterday. Schools are closed and although they should probably be doing schoolwork at home, she often sees groups of teenage boys riding their bikes around. Yesterday a group had ridden past as she was coming home with her shopping and she could have sworn she heard one of them shout “Paki,” before they all started to laugh. But they went by so quickly she reasoned that she must have imagined it. After all, she didn’t even think she looked very Asian. Her hair was grey rather than black now and at the end of winter her skin was pale. But then, she thought, why would she have imagined them using that word? She couldn’t recall ever having that racist slur thrown at her in all her sixty plus years in the UK. But since she’d moved here she noticed a lack of something. A lack of neighbourliness perhaps, or community spirit. Stan next door was friendly enough and always said hello when he saw her, the people on the other side were a young family and she’d hardly ever seen them. The fence was higher on that side and although she could hear the children playing in the garden she couldn’t see them. And of course, it had been lockdown almost since she moved here. She had noticed one of the women in the supermarket who always seemed to move away from the till when Anita was next in the queue. But it was only now that she really thought about it that she felt it could be deliberate. And she hadn’t actually seen any other non-white people at all – even the boys on bikes all seemed to be white. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in moving away from the more multicultural inner suburbs. It had never occurred to her to check out the ethnic make up of the area. Anita looked at the green alkanet again and started to feel some empathy towards it. After all, it hadn’t asked to be brought here any more than she had. But, like her, it had put down strong roots and was clearly happy in this climate. And so, Anita thought, was she.