arboreal, horticultural

A tree - a seriously pollarded tree - at the back of Berkeley Place, looking both stark and magnificent as I went up the road to fetch the newspaper this morning.

And then, later, I went to meet a graduate student (quite surreal, seeing a graduate student in Wimbledon ...) at Wimbledon Station, and walking her up the hill to have some decent coffee in Wimbledon Village (Maison Cassien - excellent cappuccino), I thought I'd show her some good public art: the murals in what used to be the Children's Library at Wimbledon Public Library.  Really, they ought to have some wall material in the room explaining what they are ... I gave Avigail false information, as it was: I thought they were done in the late 1930s, but actually it was the late 1940s - 1947-48 - and they were executed by students at the Wimbledon College of Art - see the image at the bottom.  Of course, I now want to know who these students were.  Most of the murals are of pastoral scenes - The Seasons - cows and sheep - but this one is unusual, representing what looks like a commercial greenhouse rather than a domestic conservatory.

The room is now a computer room - but the picture below shows it roughly how I remember it - er, probably from 6 or 7 years after these murals were painted.  This is the wall with Older Children's fiction - from about E-Z.  A-D was on the side of an island set of bookcases facing these: on the other side of the island were picture books (which is where I went first of all - my first borrowed book being The Cow Who Fell in the Canal).  And that was before I was three.  One wasn't meant to be able to join until I was three, so I had to prove that I could read on my own: of course since I could read, at - whatever? - two and three quarters, this didn't strike me as being at all unusual, but even at the time I registered that it mildly unnerved the library staff.  At the end of the room, non-fiction: I later - after we came back from 4 years in Cumberland - happily chewed my way through the history section.  And I'm afraid I do mean chewed: I've just remembered the rather unsavory fact that I used to tear little diagonal corners off the bottom of pages and, yes, chew them.