The lower Ouseburn valley, a cradle of the industrial revolution, not far from Newcastle, has been transformed. New apartments built on the banks of this tributary of the Tyne stand on what was, until recently, a site of dereliction.
Every summer the place used to be covered in colourful wild plants. This morning I stopped to admire the remnants of this floral tapestry making their last stand in a neatly asphalted and paved landscape. A smattering of scarlet corn poppies were blooming among grasses on a steep bank, alongside some especially fine specimens of weld, Reseda luteola, or dyer’s rocket. The plant’s inflorescences, thrumming with bumblebees, which were nesting among the brick rubble, towered above the steps that led up the slope beside this patch of wildness.
In July, before the redevelopment began, the dyer’s rocket covered an acre with its slender, 5ft tall flower spikes. Sir Edward Salisbury, a noted expert on weeds, once calculated that an average dyer’s rocket plant produced 76,000 seeds. There must be billions of them lying dormant in the soil here, waiting to germinate whenever the ground is disturbed.
It’s tempting to speculate that they might be a botanical link with the past. A dye industry once flourished nearby and weld has been used in Britain for this purpose since Roman times. “This plant affords a most beautiful yellow dye for cotton, woollen, mohair, silk, and linen, and is constantly used by dyers,” enthused William Withering, in his Botanical Arrangement, in 1776.
With Ouseburn’s newfound status as a fashionable place to live and work, I suspect some will regard this bank of “weeds” as an eyesore. But I hope it doesn’t give way to one of those bland, easy maintenance, municipal shrub-planting schemes, which more often than not become litter traps. A chance juxtaposition of folk art and wild flowers in one corner of this plot hints that it could be more than that.
The walls of old industrial buildings hereabouts have long been used by graffiti artists, who have covered grimy, industrial, brick with swirling patterns of vibrant colours and abstract designs. Today, the combination of dyer’s rocket and this riot of pigments stopped me in my tracks. It seemed an appropriate celebration of a long-lost local industry that once added colour to people’s lives.
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