This week in 1970, “The Love You Save” was at the top of the charts. Michael was 12 then. Here, the Jackson 5 perform the song, our favorite of their repertoire, before an electrified hometown crowd at West Side High School, Gary, Indiana, 1971.

You better Stop, the love you save may be your own.
Darlin’ take it slow, or someday you’ll be all alone.

Sand sculpture honoring Michael Jackson, by Sudarshan Pattnaik
Puri, India.
Photo: Biswaranjan Rout, for AP

Captain Imran Khan called it “a gift from us to the whole nation,” one especially beleaguered in recent months by terrorism and international suspicion. As recently as March, there was an attack on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore, and Pakistan was banned from hosting world cricket matches. the Twenty20 competition took place in London.

On Wednesday, fans at Allama Iqbal airport, Lahore, responded with gifts of their own – cheers and flower garlands (far preferable to slaps on the rump or dousings with icewater). Here, cricketer Abdul Razzaq is draped with roses and marigolds.

Pakistani cricket player Abdul Razzaq gets a hero’s welcome in Lahore, June 24.
Photo: K.M.Chaudary, for AP

Stacy Sirk, our keen-eyed correspondent in the European floral trade, spotted it and sent on a couple of photos. She writes, “A man had this skip filled with chunks of this wild flower meadow, and then dropped the skip on one of the most expensive shopping streets in London (right outside Conran’s).”

Adopt a meadow: attention grabber near the Chelsea Flower Show
Photo: Stacy Sirk

In case you have difficulty reading the chalkboard, here’s what it says:

STOP LORTON MEADOWS
FROM DISAPPEARING COMPLETELY

Adopt a piece of 200 year old Dorset Meadow. Lorton Meadows is a site of special scientific interest and was owned by Dorset Wildlife Trust until it was forced into a compulsory purchase in 2007 by Dorset Council. The meadows are now being destroyed to make way for a new road. If you would like to keep a piece of this land alive please just take some and give it a good home. Edward Llewellyn (and we can’t make out his email address)

Edward Llewellyn and his installation
Photo: Dorset Echo

Llewellyn is a student at the Royal College of Art; how fitting he would arrange this interactive, botanical installation during the Royal Horticultural Society’s spring flower show. Instant audience.

Apparently, some passersby did take him up on the offer: Llewellyn told the Dorset Echo: “I think people wanted to take some of it because it is symbolic. They didn’t take it for what it is, they took it for what it represents.”

The young artist said that he initially had considered scooping up airport-expansion lands or some of the property being bulldozed to make way for London’s Olympics, “but I felt it was more powerful to talk about open countryside that is being destroyed.”

So did Stacy, “It is very unique and poignant, I think,” she wrote.

Edward Llewellyn’s meadow giveaway: during the RHS Flower Show, 2009
Photo: Stacy Sirk

So do we. Dropping this funeral but lovely mound of green earth in a swanky ultra-urban part of the capital makes for a sharp juxtaposition. (Image if you encountered this same plea along a country road.) 

Thanks, Stacy, for passing this human flower project along. A three-fer!