Hastings steps

Hastings in East Sussex UK has many flights of steps ascending the various hills around the town.

Noonan’s Steps climbs like a waterless cascade up the flank of the West Hill.

The walls and crevices support many different plants, wet and shiny after the overnight rain. There are ivy-leaved toadflax and trailing bellflower; elder and sycamore bushes; shepherd's purse, goosegrass and clumps of moss casually thrown off neighbouring roofs by insect hunting birds.  The photo below is of some alexanders, Smyrnium olusatrum, hanging over a wall:

At one spot there was a battered typewriter lying in a doorway next to an empty can of Red Bull. Maybe an aspiring writer had thrown it and the empty can from an upper window in frustration when the muse would not visit. Whatever the case, no novels, or poems, or letters were going to emerge from its keys again. It seemed strange though that it had survived for so long in this computer age.

For typewriter aficionados it is a Commodore, probably made in Canada.  Taxonomy has got me!

I walked back down Gas Works Steps and up Stonefield Road. 

Here, as in lots of other place, were some good examples of a sprawling  Cerastium.  It is, I think, sea mouse-ear, C. diffusum but I will have to do a bit more work on that as it a difficult genus.

I also found a spray of oak-leaved honeysuckle, I think just a juvenile form of our ordinary wild honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum.