Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.
These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.
I have spent more than two decades staring at maps. Not paper maps on a wall, but digital ones with multiple layers: flood boundaries draped over census blocks, car crash hot spots plotted against road geometry, and satellite readings of rainfall stitched across river basins. Much of my work as a civil and environmental engineer is done through GIS – that is, geographic information systems. Engineers like me hold several spatial relationships in their minds at once, reasoning about where things sit relative to one another across scales ranging from a city block to a whole watershed.
I always assumed that spatial reasoning across map layers was purely professional. But that study on taxi and ambulance drivers made me wonder whether all that mental work might be doing something good to the brain.
Taxi driver brains
Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer’s disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.
This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs. The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn’t seem to experience a similar advantage.
Casualties have mounted during the summer’s extreme heat. Minimise future losses by including these great survivors
Brown lawns, wilting borders, drooping trees: I have been married to a hosepipe though we are now legally separated. Much of what I love in British gardens hates prolonged drought. Seven weeks of heat have been hell, but not hopeless: adversity is an opportunity.
Sufferers are painfully obvious. Plants with shallow roots near the soil’s surface have been stressed or scorched to death. In borders I love phloxes but they hate drought. So do monardas, even though recent varieties surmount the mildew which used to ruin them in late summer. Small hardy plants have been very badly hit too. Primroses were lovely in spring, but have shrivelled to a small core. So have violets. In each case they should recover with rain but scorched companions may be gone for good. I cherish a small form of pink-flowered London Pride, the easy Saxifraga umbrosa ‘Elliotts Variety’. It was selected years ago by the great plantsman Clarence Elliott, who encouraged me personally as a boy. Even in semi-shade its rosettes of leaves have gone completely brown: I fear the worst.
Plants which need to grow quickly have been ravaged. Dahlias grow tall and strong only when they take up plenty of water. So do most annuals. Dahlias are looking miserable except in waterable pots. I have been wrongfooted with many of my annuals too, not just because slugs stripped the marigolds and zinnias in two nights in early June when rain was still falling. Heliotropes, the new lavateras and damp-loving mimulus were wrong calls in the first place. Running two big gardens, at home and at New College in Oxford, I cannot cope with watering by hand everything we bed out, so these bedding plants are dead.
Among roses I have had no losses and one remarkable gain. There is next to no black spot on any of them. I remember standing with the great rose grower Peter Beales in his Norfolk growing fields on a blazing August day more than 40 years ago. He was running a big water sprinkler and observed that wherever the water reached, his thousands of roses were free of black spot. This year the opposite is true: black spot has been minimal in the drought. Maybe the wet prelude to this summer helped build up resistance to it. Anyway, clean-leaved roses are one gain from the long dry spell.
Among shrubs, most of the hydrangeas in open ground are looking wretched. So are most of the clematis, especially bigger-flowered varieties which peaked in May and June. Among trees, the damage of a drought often takes a year to show to the full. Newly planted birch, beech and almost everything bunged in by the hundreds along roadsides has already shrivelled and died without backup watering.
Prepare for even worse in 2027. The projections for next year are dry and hot too, so I expect painful losses to continue to emerge in 2028. Luckily, I planted avenues of drought-resistant hornbeam, not beech, 40 years ago, and in crucial places I chose silver limes, trees whose leaves are ingeniously adapted to extreme heat. Remember these two survivors: I will return in the planting season to others that are emerging as prudent choices for dry Britain.
Back in the flowerbeds, I mapped out proportional plantings two years ago. Hot summers seem likely, but not all year, every year: proportional plantings balance loveable phloxes and delphiniums with drought-tolerant companions. The DTs, or drought tolerants, need to go up to 70 per cent of the mix. Persistent winners among them are blue-flowered perovskias (recently reclassified as Salvia ‘Blue Spire’), white-flowered gauras and Japanese anemones as soon as they settle their roots into a new site. Go big on them with pleasure. The single white-flowered Anemone japonica is one of the loveliest of all flowers, untroubled by weeks without rain. It is excellent in urban gardens and although its roots run when settled, they are less invasive than many of its pink-flowered relations. From now on it has to be a mainstay.
Otherwise, think grey and turn on the taps, by which I mean tap roots. Grey and silver leaves are plants’ defences against excessive heat, so use shrubby Senecio greyi, botanically now Brachyglottis ‘Sunshine’, as a repeated building block in your plans, much as you might have used box bushes in the pre-moth days. It is not so tidy but if you clip it hard, it remains about 3ft high and wide. As I like its yellow daisy flowers, I cut it in August after flowering. Make it a new mainstay with silver Helichrysum angustifolium as a lower-growing foil, the one whose leaves smell of curry when pressed, and evergreen rosemary, pleasantly tumbling except after very cold winters. Think beyond the box and let them guide your eye as you work out a drought-resistant plan.
Do not be conned into believing that drought-proof gardens have to be full of “ornamental” grasses and flowers that are a washy shade of purple-pink. Use agapanthus and hemerocallis, two lovely staples, as each has fleshy roots and a readiness to survive weeks of drought without watering. Modern hemerocallis, or daylilies, throw up flowers in many seductive tones, from lemon yellow to deep red, blending with blue and white agapanthus, the hardiest being the ones that die down in winter. Preface their season with tap-rooted verbascums and with thalictrums, winners this year as they are meadow plants with fleshy water-retaining roots. When they die back anyway in mid-July, lead on with hollyhocks, superb survivors in dry years, and the flat-headed yellow flowers of Achillea ‘Gold Plate’. This stalwart of Edwardian borders has stems up to 5ft high and has been flowering for a month in unwatered beds. It will be followed by September’s many daisies, popularly lumped together as asters. None of mine are wilting: I anticipate an autumn of hazy flowers, dampened by overnight dew.
In return, a plea. Many of you have written to ask what I make, as a life-long classicist, of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey film. I wrote in advance about Homer’s gardens, which Nolan left out, but I have now been to see what he included. I want to bring three class actions against him for defamation if you will join on behalf of those defamed. One is on behalf of Homer and the anonymous poets who composed our Odyssey without any rubbish about PTSD, Post Troy Stress Disorder, a hallmark of Nolan’s Odysseus when he returns to Penelope. Another is on behalf of Helen of Troy, famed in antiquity for her fair hair, exquisite breasts and a skin, surely, which was never in urgent need of a dermatologist, unlike Nolan’s miscast Helen on screen.
My third action is on behalf of the Greek heroes. Nolan has had the nerve to misidentify them as the Sea Peoples, a modern name for up to nine separate peoples mentioned as ravagers in the east Mediterranean in enigmatic, mainly Egyptian texts: they were not Greek heroes at all. They are nowhere in theOdyssey and are irrelevant to it: it is as if Wagner soldiers were to be misidentified as Italians and wodged into a future movie mistitled “The” Aeneid. Homer’s Odysseus, but not Nolan’s, received a flower, moly, from the god Hermes to protect him against Circe’s magic. If only we knew what moly was, we could take it to protect us from Nolan. Moly, gift of a god, would surely thrive in drought
