Favourite flowers and much-loved trees are a guide to where you live
I map my walks in flowers, or at least in interesting trees. There is the heavy-scented perpetual rose I will take a wide detour for if I am walking towards Regent’s Canal; and there’s the semi-wild, three-cornered leek that fills a Kentish Town front yard whose flowers I always enjoy and smell.
In autumn, I change my route to admire the dinner-plate saffron dahlia that grows by the Hindu Centre. In summer, it is the Bengali amaranth in window boxes with gourds clambering over a neighbouring wall.