Transporting Delicate Plants by Bike

Every now and again I am asked which everyday items I find the trickiest to carry by bike. The expectation is for it to be something fragile, like eggs or glassware. But those I've actually found pretty manageable. Eggs do just fine in their cartons. Glassware and picture frames can be wrapped in crumpled paper or bubblewrap. Honestly, I have yet to break an egg or a wine glass on a two wheeled commute, and I'm not even especially careful. But what I do find tricky to transport by bike is plants - in particular, small potted plants with delicate stems and flowers. So easy they are to bruise and snap, that merely placing them at the bottom of a pannier or basket can result in a sad mangled mess by the end of a bumpy ride home. But you can't exactly wrap them in bubblewrap either! So for these dainty, fragrant beauties, I've come up with a system: 

Take, for instance, the lovely little cyclamen. They come in beautiful shapes and colours and are fairly low-maintenance to have around the house. But they don't do so well in transport. The petals bruise easily when they come in contact with pretty much anything, and the flowers have a tendency to snap off at the slightest provocation. The stems go limp and droop from being jostled. 

To keep this from happening, I have taken to constructing a protective collar. It is extremely easy to make: simply take stiff paper or thin cardboard, wrap it around your plant and tape it together. 

The idea is to fit it fairly tightly around the plant and to make it high enough to cover the whole thing. This way, the cardboard collar both contains the stems and protects the petals from contact with other objects - even if the plant should tip over in transit.

But the key to preventing the plant tipping over is creating a stable platform. With the exception of rack-mounted crates, few bicycle baskets and panniers have stable, solid floors. More often the bottom of a bike bag or basket is curved, saggy, or uneven. So if you can find a small crate or box that will fit inside your bag and in which your plants can snuggly sit, this will make their transport a lot less perilous. 

No matter what size you need, finding a suitable crate should not be difficult. Garden centers, flower shops and fruit and vegetable stands all have loads of crates and boxes that they happily give away to customers. 

The crate I am using here is a tangerine crate that fits inside my Brompton "bagsket" snugly, and is extremely lightweight to boot (gotta shave off those grams where you can!).  

To prevent the plants from shifting inside the crate, I stuff crumpled paper (or whatever soft objects are handy) into the gaps. 

And voila, we are ready to ride! To provide some perspective, the places where I get my plants are 7+ miles from my house along bumpy roads. I've also carried my own plants as gifts to friends a similar distance away. And with the help of a stable platform and cardboard collars, they arrive intact. 

Of course, not all potted plants require this much fuss. Geraniums, for example, I have found to be surprisingly indestructible and can transport them without the cardboard contraptions. But it's good to be able to carry even the most delicate little blooms by bike if I feel like it, with the help of some simple DIY. 

Last Days of the Lilacs

My favourite flowers are lilacs, and I've been fortunate enough to live in places where they thrive. Though the delicate clusters of four-leaf blossoms are pretty, what gets me is not their look but their scent. And the scent of lilacs is more than just nice. It is alluring, intoxicating, disorienting. It does something to me, like a drug, activating what must surely be a lilac-specific pleasure center in my brain and inducing an intense, blissful high while making me crave more. Come the month of May and the scent follows me around as I walk and cycle the streets - sharp an dewy in the morning, thick and musky in the evening, and always driving me mad. I hardly know whether to be sad or happy that the lilac season only spans a few weeks. I want them near me year round, but that might be too much of a good thing. So I content myself instead with taking some home every year from a local park and enjoying their fleeting bloom while it lasted. 

This year, however, proved tricky. I've kept my eyes peeled for lilacs in the parks and forests of the Roe Valley, but the only ones I've come across have been on private property. Neither bold enough to knock on strangers' doors and ask for their flowers, not criminally-minded enough to steal them under the cover of night, for weeks I continued searching for lilacs in the wild with no result, until the mauve four-leaf blossoms began to wilt and thin. The last days of the lilacs had come, and it looked like I would miss out on gathering them this year. 

So I thought on my way to an errand early this morning. My eyes still half-shut with sleep, I rolled into the courtyard and coasted right past them at first. Then I nearly slammed the brakes and backtracked. An enormous hedge, overwhelmed with fat, fluffy lilac clusters, stood right beside the house I'd come to. "Could I buy some of those from you?" I said to the man I'd come to see about a thing. "You want a bush for your garden?" "Oh no, just to put in a vase." "Ach take as many as you like, they'll only be wilting now anyway."

With a silly grin, I pedaled home with lilacs in my basket. They were past their prime now, fragile and losing petals easily on the bumpy road, releasing bursts of scent laced with hints of a pre-rot sweetness. 

At home I removed the withered brown blossoms, cut the stems down and arranged the bunches in small vases around the house, filling it with the dizzying scent.

And the petals that had shed in transit did not go to waste. Did you know that lilacs are edible? Their sharp herbal taste makes for an especially nice garnish on eggy-cheesy dishes. Here's to an end of a beautiful Spring, and to Summer's impeding arrival. 

Cycling Scent-sations

Cycling the maze of Roe Valley's coastal farm roads, everything in early May is yellow. The dark golden warmth of thorny whin hedges borders the lemony coolness of rapeseed blossoms, and together they're fringed by generous sprinklings of matte creamy buttercups. Rolling past these swells of subtly-altering yellowness, I realise that I can parse out the plants, even from a distance, by more than just their hue. I can smell them each individually, even before I can see them. Coming around the bend, the honeyed scent of the whin flower heralds a prickly wall of yellow ahead. Strange, since I can't ever seem to smell this plant off the bike - even if I walk right up to the hedge and sniff the flowers up close. 

It is not only flowers that smell more strongly from the bicycle. On sunny mid-mornings I pick up on scents of freshly washed laundry hung out to dry. 

In the evenings the smells of peat fires being lit and dinners being cooked taunt me as I hurry hungrily home in the rapidly cooling air.

I can smell horses and farm animals, and other warm farmy scents, and increasingly I can tell what exactly they are.

I can smell the sunbaked stone of village centers and housing estates.

And the damp, musky stone of dilapidated structures reclaimed by new growths of forest.

In the distance, but sometimes up close, and sometimes beneath me over a cliff's edge, I can smell the sea, with its salty slimy growths, pale grasses and petrified shellfish.

I can smell the rich soil.

I can smell the coming rain.

I can smell that exquisite sentimentality up at Ballyhacket mountain at dusk that is probably moss and peat heated up by the slow-burning sun, then released in subtle vaporous doses through the evening hours. 

It is reasonable to assume that this heightened awareness of scents comes from being outdoors, not enclosed in a car or building. But I think it goes beyond that. After all, my sense of smell on the bike seems keener than when merely lounging outside or walking. It also seems to grow stronger the harder I go, the more I exert myself. A friend has noticed this in himself as well, and his thinking is that cycling - with its strain, its focus, its heightened appetite, and its reliance on intuitions - sharpens the senses, making the rider more animalistically attuned to the layered nuances of scent. After hours on the bike, pushing their limits, the rider is no longer simply a person on two wheels. No, something is added in the process. Slowly the rider is transformed into an altogether different animal - one that is gifted with a richer and deeper olfactory experience. The effect may only be temporary, but the memories and secret knowledge it leaves us with remain ours forever. 

Floods and Flowers

A ride that starts with mild rain, luring me out, ambushes with a downpour. I am too far out now to turn back. Might as well keep going.

This is all right. My tires slice through puddles.

Rain, rain, pouring rain. Drumming against my helmet. Dripping from my visor. This is okay. This is rather peaceful. The roads are all mine.

Meadow, meadow, forest, farm. Farm, farm, forest.

But darn, what's this. Country road, traffic backed up around the bend. I pedal carefully along the shoulder.

Endless line of cars, deep puddles, feet clipped in, water pouring down my face off the soggy visor, thinking "This is crazy," feeling calm, humming to myself.

A woman driver in a pickup rolls down her window. She points to my bike, then points to the back of her truck. I half-raise my hand in a half-wave like "I'm good, thanks." She shakes her head and smiles. I pass her in traffic.

Pedal, pedal, pedal. Rain, rain, rain. Cars, cars. Honking. Brake lights.

Two teenage boys in a Jeep roll down their window and lean over. "Cool bike! Cool braids!" Thumbs up to me from the teenage boys.

There is a soggy book on the grassy side of the road. Tossed by a kid out of a car window? Kittens on the cover. Bloated, wet kittens.

Let's see, what is going on at the front of all this backed up traffic...

A broken light. A ditch at the intersection filled with deep water. The bigger cars rolling though it slowly. The smaller cars frantically flashing their signals, making U-turns.

I pass them all and turn right. No one else wants to go there. What's wrong with right?

No matter. An end to the chaos. A silent empty road. Trees, trees. Darkness at noon. Streams of water across the pavement. Rain.

This is okay. This is all right. This is rather peaceful. The road is all mine. My shoe touches water on the downstroke.

And then I smell the flowers. A deep, heavy scent, almost an odor. The raindrops carry it, like perfume oil. A low-hanging branch of blossoms. I grab it and pedal home.

My bike is upside down in the kitchen. My flower, my prize is on the table. The rain has stopped, like none of it had ever happened. But water droplets glisten on the petals. And on the pedals.

Our Enchanted Blue Forest

Every April, some of my bicycle photos feature a background of what appears to be a carpet of blue  flowers. Readers ask all the time what those flowers are and where I managed to find an entire field of them. Funny, until about 4 years ago I do not remember seeing many of these around myself. Then one spring - my first spring of cycling - I was riding around the neighbourhood and discovered a patch of them on a lawn. It caught my eye, because the shade of blue seemed unnaturally over-saturated. From a distance it looked like someone had spilled cerulean paint on the grass! Later I spotted another small patch of the same flowers in a nearby park, and again marveled at the effect. I meant to investigate further, but a week later the flowers were gone. I did not think of them again, until the following April, when they reappeared in much larger quantities. Now the lawn where I had spotted the first patch was covered with them completely. The ones in the park had spread over a wider area as well.

When I stopped to examine the flowers closely, I saw that individually they were not remarkable or even especially pretty. Scraggly tiny things with long, misshapen, sharply pointed petals. It was hard to find one photogenic enough to photograph on its own, and large enough to capture without a macro lens.  

Their beauty came from growing in clusters. When they cover a patch of soil, all those tiny blooms merge into a quivering sea of blues and greens of incredible intensity. The larger the area they spread across, the more mesmerising and overwhelming their effect. 

By the third year, they'd spread further still - spilling over to multiple lawns all over the neighbourhood, and transforming the small fenced-in park near my house. Finally I learned what the flowers are. Rather unromantically, they are called wood squills. Also known as Siberian squill, or Scilla siberica - a "bulbous perennial in the family Asparagaceae." The flowers produce blue pollen, which may explain their misty, hazy quality when observed from afar. Easy to cultivate, they spread by seed and form large colonies in early spring that bloom quickly and disappear by the time the first growth of grass is ready to be mowed. 

Apparently Scilla siberica colonies can become invasive, and it looks like our little park has been invaded! Even this year's cold, slow spring has not stopped the squills from covering the entire stretch of the woods in cerulean carpet, turning the park - a popular pedestrian shortcut for locals - into an enchanted blue forest. Walking through here is absolutely stunning. One of those sights that makes you breathe in deeply, squint at the sun, and just feel happy to be a part of this strange, beautiful world.