Indian balsam, smelling of lavatory cleaner but alive with insects, blanketed the thrown-out bottles. Thirty-foot high bushes of buddleia from China towered above the layered sprays of knotweed from Japan, magenta-flowered everlasting-pea from the Mediterranean and the exquisite swan-necked blooms of thornapple, a weed now so spread about the world that its original home is unknown.
