Boston Ivy

Was going to say that your foxgloves look particularly lovely with the brick wall back-drop. Now I see that your whole place is that lovely red brick. so warm to look at!

All the older houses are red brick in Southport. When my parents moved up here from Surrey, we though it very odd! I quite liked it, and now I love it, and it does provide a lovely backdrop for plants.

Oh yes. We see very little red brick locally. In fact it stands out very much here. And most of the red brick buildings are victorian railway buildings. You can tell them so easily by the shinyness of the bricks!

They are probably stock bricks, which is faced and has a really smooth surface. A lot of the bigger houses here were built with them.

I call it Railway bricks! And it's fascinating because you can see where all the old defunct railway lines were by the few or single railway brick houses beside the defunct bridges. There were tons of lines around here, as they used them to transport all the soft fruit overnight from the countryside to London. I wish they were all still there, it would have made a brilliant local public transport network!

Wonderful, Susanne, and especially with the robin and the wren residents.

Thank you Tuesdaybear!

The school site over the wall used to be railway land, though that's just coincidental as the bricks are ubiquitous here. Tracing old railway lines is fascinating. When I was at college, part of our geography fieldwork was plotting the ages of houses in a town. You could plainly see the old railway lines traced out in grey squares on the map (grey being the colour for post-war housing. It's true what they say about geographers and coloured pencils. Every type of Land Use has a specified colour of Derwent pencil!)

When you think how the canal network has been revived, you wonder what future generations will make of the ripping up of the railways. The best thing is when they are left without being built on, and provide wonderful green spaces for people.

I like "green" houses like these. They cool the house in hot summers and isolate it in very cold winters.

Yes. There are some very interesting green walls in some places. I cleared the ivy away from the bathroom window last week - it was almost totally obscuring it. I did it by opening the window and pulling it off the wall. Fortunately, it comes off very easily - it is attached by little suckers and doesn't burrow into the fabric of the house, otherwise I might not be so keen on it!

Here architects say, that ivy is a good solution for gree walls, but they must be in a good shape before plantng ivy on them. If they are not, Ivy can cause damage to walls.

I think that's quite right, Katarina. I know the man who does our roof and brickwork is very happy with it.

OK. Just curiousity, but it reminds me a book I read as a girl: "Ann from a green house".

"Anne of Green Gables" by L.M.Montgomery? One of my all-time favourite childhood books. [I read these books to my daughter - she was already 10 and a very good reader, but we enjoyed sharing books this way. She has just re-read one of the sequels (she's 31 now) and said she could hear my voice] The stories are about an orphan girl growing up on Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Yes, that is right. In my language it was translated like Ann from a Green House, what does gables mean?
By the way, it wasn t my favourite book. From British authors I read all Dickens´novels, being a a child bedridden due to broken leg, and Wuthering Heights from E. Bronte I read several times, I was very unhappy with the story endpoints. Since that time I had impression fro quite a long time, that Britain is cold and dark. My most popular authors were Scandinavians, Trygve Emanuel Gulbranssen was almost biblical in our family, all women had to read his trilogy Beyond Sing the Woods.

I must admit my first recommendation to a bedridden child would not have been either Dickens or Bronte! No wonder you had a grim impression of England!

Gables are the triangular bits on the front or end of a roof. They usually have wood on them, which is painted - hence "green gables", which is the name given to the farm where Anne goes to live.

As well as the Anne books, when I was a child I enjoyed reading Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. The last one was my favourite. In it the heroine (a child) makes a pet of a rat, and calls him Melchisedec. He is only mentioned in one chapter, but you can see the name made a great impression on me! It can be spelt in various ways, but that is how it is in the book so that's how I write it.

Another great favourite was The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. I first came across it when I went to Grammar School - the needlework teacher read it to us while we were sewing. We loved it, and couldn't wait to hear the next chapters the following week.

Book we have read and loved in childhood leave a lasting impression - I have a great many of them still and re-read some of them occasionally.

I don't suppose many of us would choose to name ourselves after a rat...

That´s right, but I always have association of a very old and wise spirit, when I read "Melchisedec", sounds almost like an Old Testament name.

Melchisedec was indeed an Old Testament figure. He was the first priest to make an offering of bread and wine rather than sacrificing an animal.

Lol. Thank you. I didn´t remember this.