Routes and roots: mapping my walks

I map my walks in flowers, or at least in interesting trees. There is the heavy-scented perpetual rose I will take a wide detour for if I am walking towards Regent’s Canal; and there’s the semi-wild, three-cornered leek that fills a Kentish Town front yard whose flowers I always enjoy and smell.

In autumn, I change my route to admire the dinner-plate saffron dahlia that grows by the Hindu Centre. In summer, it is the Bengali amaranth in window boxes with gourds clambering over a neighbouring wall.

My walks over Hampstead Heath take in the secret grove with the hollow tree and the wood anemone by the lake. I will always pass by the Kenwood rhododendron, but I guess everyone else does, too.

It is the secret talismans I look for – the less obvious wild flowers. When I was a boy there was a hidden bluebell wood on my river roam: deep blue in summer shade if you took a right turn at the right time by Devon’s small Avon estuary.

Today, when I turn into the allotment road, there is an intense patch of snowdrops which I look out for; then there’s the almost invisible violets that come up every year, and the rare wild lilies only a few of us know about.

Most mornings at my beach hut we first take a walkabout: a rummage around the plot to see if our wood anemones are there yet, or the occasional white violets, cowslips and pink campions that appear out the back.

What I am looking for is the idea of a wild meadow where wild flowers can flourish. But it is the quiet hepatica that makes me happiest. A few stray blue flowers half-hidden in the hedges that tell me that spring has really arrived. I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, says Shakespeare, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Now, happily, so do we.

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