Country diary: This wee park is a suburban underdog

I’m in the Southside of Glasgow, walking through Pollokshields, one of the first garden suburbs to be created in Britain. The streets are wide and lined with Edwardian and Victorian villas, and red and blond sandstone tenements, and it’s a part of Glasgow that still feels spacious.

The trunks of huge mature lime trees that line the railway embankment are swathed with shiny greens of ivy leaves that tangle along the railings too, and I can hear a flock of long-tailed tits in the topmost branches. A heron flies low overhead, crossing streets and train lines.

I’m on my way to Maxwell Park, and to its pond, and if I didn’t know where I was going I would wonder at why it was there at all. Maxwell Park is much smaller than the other – probably better known – Southside green spaces of Queens Park and Pollok Country Park. But it’s a wee haven, with a pond that’s host to mallards, tufted ducks, moorhens and coots, and a pair of mute swans, which this morning are displaying: for a split second they come together, making that perfect heart shape with their necks and bills.

Recently, there’s been a single male goosander scrabbling along with the other ducks for the bread that people still throw in the water, so close that I could see its stunning iridescent head and serrated bill as it opened to catch the bread. The goosander has gone now, but this park will always throw up surprises, like a little grebe or a massive flock of waxwings early one spring.

Walking back, on the other side of the track, there’s a lime tree that’s so wreathed with ivy that from a distance it looks like it’s a broadleaf tree in full summer. The ivy has crept not just up the trunk but along its branches, and is so thick it partially hides the railings. I go down to the railway station to take a photograph of it when, high above, I hear the mew of a buzzard, which doesn’t surprise me.

Glasgow Southside’s green spaces are huge and a welcome haven for both humans and wildlife. I make a note to go to Pollok Park next time, to see what’s there.

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