Technology and nature

But for technology I  wouldn’t be posting this now, but nature will win the end.

Three years ago I installed solar panels, not on the roof but in the garden. Cleaning panels on the roof can be difficult, and if anything goes wrong with the  roof itself – right under your solar array – well, that can be quite a challenge. What are you supposed to do, remove them to fix the leak? You may well have to do just that.

But, and there is always a ‘but’, the location for the panels coincided with the best patch of Veronica anywhere in the garden, and I was very reluctant to cover these wonders of nature with the works of man.

Veronica grows wild. There are several species, of course, but the one native to us grows close to the ground and produces beautiful, tiny blue flowers. We have several outbreaks. I visit them daily and never let the mower cut them down. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, The Tuft of Flowers, where Frost realised a man with a scythe had done exactly that, left the flowers to bloom.

 

Veronica (Photo credit: hopeful<3 (ill/off))

Three years went by and I missed them every April and May but behold, lo, they have successfully fought their way out from under the consoles the panels are mounted on! And when you consider that the consoles are full of gravel and exceptionally heavy, you have to wonder at that. How did they do it, they are so small and delicate? I have no idea, but they did.