Odd One Out

I am not sure what happened here. A wall of maize comes right up to the road and if you are driving past you just see a strange spectacle of bright red flowers on the maize stalks.

They look like a variety of gladioli, but are large, three, maybe four foot tall and have purple stems.

It's not that it doesn't look nice, it does. But what will happen to the flower border when those huge monsters – combine harvesters come to mow down the maize? Will the gladioli survive?

And even more interesting: is it a territorial dispute between the farmer and the council, or the other way round a creative co-operation, say, the farmer plants maize and his wife does the flowers to make an industrial agricultural landscape look prettier?

Photos: ©A.Anichkin