It’s a cold Saturday and Merry Old England seems like a vanished memory.

(1) A quote from The Accidental Garden by Richard Mabey:

I’ve always relished the power of plants to take you to other times and places, to transport you. They’re mordants, fixers of experience. In the gloom of winter, and then again in the often maddeningly erratic progress of the English spring, there are moments when I long, disloyally, for wild thyme underfoot, for the blissfully unlikely sight of gladioli growing wild, for cistus and sage and rosemary bushes dotting hot limestone rocks somewhere in the south.

(2) A scan from 200 Years of Britain’s Railways in 14 Journeys by Sherin Aminossehe: