As Samuel Beckett once wrote "Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards" so I went to Tower Hamlets Cemetery on Saturday where Roy Vickery was leading a walking tour.
 Roy was formerly Curator of Flowering Plants at the Natural History Museum. As far as I can tell he is one of those people who spends retirement working constantly on various projects. He continues at the Museum as a Scientific Associate curating the lichen collections and he is also President of the South London Botanical Institute.
 I must write an entry about the SLBI sometime. I was quite surprised when I discovered a number of years ago that there is a botanical garden in Tulse Hill. It was founded in 1910 by Allan Octavian Hume, an extraordinary man who among other things was in charge of planting the Great Hedge of India which was over a thousand kilometres long. Anyway that will have to keep for another day.
 Roy leads walks in London from time to time to search for and identify common and uncommon plants growing wild in a particular locale. I remember strolling around Balham a few years ago and the staff of a Chinese restaurant were quite alarmed when they saw us in their back yard looking at a rare plant Roy had spotted growing by the bins.
 Tower Hamlets was one of the seven great cemeteries built in the Victorian era around London and it has a great variety of plants. Some are perhaps survivals from when this area would have been on the edge of the countryside. Some are most likely escapes from local gardens over the years and it looks like some have been introduced more recently in a conscious effort to increase biodiversity. Roy mentioned he had looked round the day before and counted 120 species currently in flower.
 Above are a few of the pics I took: Red Valerian, Cow Parsley, Beaked Hawk's Beard (I think??), Ox-eye Daisy, Greater Celendine, Comfrey, Shining Cranesbill and Greater Stichwort.