I’ve been watching the growth of vegetation in the little Styx (aka Chaucer Street Drain); lots of reeds, rushes, hyacinth, cress and all sorts of other things I don’t know the names of. Great habitat for dragonflies, ducks and poddy fish.
Up around Lambton Ker-rai Creek I’ve seen bobcats clearing this stuff but down here it’s kind of forgotten about. Which suits me. However, in the last-big-flow-but-one the force of the water barrelling out of the bridge beneath the rail track was such that it tore entire sections of reed bed up and out into the main creek where, for a few weeks, they bobbed up and down with the tide like islands.
Eventually they became stranded on the concrete bed by the receding tide where they broke up into smaller clumps, before being washed away completely by the last flood.
A walk up the little Styx shows just how powerful the flush of water through the narrowing of the channel there could be. The remaining reed beds are torn at the edges, the root mat of soil that holds them in place having been peeled away from the banking.
This section hung on after the first deluge but was weakened enough to get ripped up with the most recent pour through.
This is how it looks now; compare and contrast with the photo at the top of the post.
It’s already in the process of growing back, the roots of the lilies and bulrushes gripping the tiny cracks in the concrete. By 2039 you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was even a concrete drain ever there.