Monday 28 May 2018

200words: temperate house

A happy afternoon was spent in Decimus Barton’s display case reliquary for a horticultural cult, a grand taxonomy of remnant endangered species grown from cuttings.

~ Cut crisp in Panamas with florid accessories, the waspish Waitrose card carrying preening priestly class drawls reedy dry Henley vowels, vestigial of an invisible Raj. This crystal cathedral a refuge to the raffish cad’s saviour complex.

~ Banker dad bods dazed and blasé clique with like listless paternity leavers, pouting preppy with an all-terrain Bugaboo swagger, self-medicating the horror of fatherhood with a domesticated mother nature, tamed, contained and wipe-clean.

~ Bushy eager ‘lotment gardeners leaned ont spade stoic doffing floppy oilcloth capped over weather winked cagoules. Stooped and mellow fruitful, two pilgrim soil-scuffed spiral-bound sweethearts, joint attending in furtive reverent whisper, this is holy ground.

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Richmond’s rusting ruin-ready skeletal Angkor Wat has been tamed, the gnarly triffids trimmed, the heavy hulking jungle pruned. The lazy gutsy grandeur of truss trellising and galloping rivets, are now squeaky and synthetically shades of white and magnolia. A sterile anaemic modernity draws charmless stainless service trunking through the ironwork and plaster festoonery, the data veins of a parasitic plant cabletied in place. This is the stage set for aestheticised STEM porn.

kew.org

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