Jackdaws, Breathing Earth… and Ballads of Belonging

Two herons were circling above our street. Long, languid, cramp-necked, they rose from the river valley and wheeled a pattern over the suburban roofs. The jackdaws on the chimneys showed little reaction in their blue-bead eyes. But they miss nothing – and they were watching, idly.

It is April. The jackdaws are nest building; trying out chimneys for size. They are both fitful and laid back. Secure in their familial groups, fussing over twigs, stalking the road for insects, they pick up anything vaguely useful as nesting material and carry it back, both purposeful and half-hearted, to their respective chimneys of choice. They have a ‘that-will-do’ attitude as they plonk down their finds, and then seem to change tack and become like obsessed artists, Jackson Pollock-like, bending over their seemingly random creations, arranging and re-arranging.

The chimneys opposite our house are favourites with our jackdaw-neighbours, sometimes for nesting, but mostly just as places to gather, survey the scene. It is touching to see the bonds each mating pair exhibit; how they remain together, life companions, all year round, mutually preening and sharing in meaningful jackdaw collusion.

These pairs are each part of the larger group which seems to revolve its days around these streets. From here, the members of the flock spread out in satellite manoeuvres, separating into small groups or pairs, but remaining constantly connected by lines of jackdaw communication and family bonding. Open a door or window, and a cacophony of jackdaw chat bounces in, via the corvid-telegraph.

Some evenings, I’ve looked out to see them calling each other to dusk-gatherings on the roofs. Obediently, they arrive in ones and twos, and land, poised and listening. Then, once each flock member is accounted for, a dominant jackdaw will say the word - and, as if on the beat of a single collective wing, they will swoop like a feathered shadow towards the woods to roost.

In The Rookery, a chapter from the deeply treasure-filled pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, Deakin draws our attention to another chapter in another book – a favourite inspiration from his boyhood. He describes how, in his formative years, he would often pick up Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring and re-read, over and over, Lorenz’s account of ‘…how, beginning in 1927, he raised a whole colony of free-flying jackdaws at his home in Altenberg in Austria, with the object of studying their social and family behaviour.’ Over time, Lorenz identified and learnt to recognise a variety of words in the Jackdaw vocabulary. Deakin tells us:

‘Most interesting of all is Lorenz’s discovery of the subtle distinction between ‘Kia’ and ‘Kiaw.’ The first is the cry uttered in flight by the dominant jackdaws to urge the whole flock outward to new feeding grounds. The second is to urge them home. Thus, ‘Kiaw’ plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the flock when one meets another.

Most birds seem to keep their song quite separate from their language. The staccato alarm cry of a wren or blackbird is quite distinct from its sweet song. Jackdaws, however, incorporate their words into their songs to create, as Lorenz puts it, something more like a ballad, in which they can re-create past adventures or directly express emotions. Not only this, but the singer accompanies the different cries with the corresponding gestures, quivering or threatening like the lustiest performer passionately enacting a song. In a way, the jackdaw is mimicking itself….. but it may also, Lorenz thinks, be expressing emotion. When a marten broke into the roosting aviary at Altenberg and killed all but one of his jackdaw flock, the lone survivor sat all day on the weathervane and sang. The dominant theme of her song, repeated over and over, was ‘Kiaw’, ‘Come back, oh, come back.’ It was a song of heartbreak.’

- From Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin, published by Hamish Hamilton:

What ballads, I wonder, did the ancestors of ‘our’ jackdaws sing, before these houses were built? What world did they then describe? And did they ever call for it to come back, when it was lost?

According to old maps – and to the stories told to us by our elder neighbours – sixty, seventy years ago, this land, where our house now stands, was a margin of orchards, fields and market gardens – a ribbon of green stretching to meet the woods and river valley. In the pre- and post- World War Two years, new housing crept across the fields, spreading further and further outward from the city, leaving vigorous green gaps, and plunging watery valleys – and a new songline for the jackdaws to adapt to and follow. These houses, the tarmac, television aerials, the gutters and chimneys all grew to become incidentals of the jackdaws’ world, morphed by the birds’ use into look-out posts, nesting sites, drinking water catchments, navigable features of a landscape. Younger jackdaw generations grew up always having known these streets – perhaps singing a particular ballad that belongs just here, and to this time in its jackdaw history.

But maybe, that ballad too will soon be out of date – an ode to past times. Throughout these streets, fewer and fewer houses are keeping their front gardens. More and more people have paved theirs over as hard standing for cars. When we first moved to this house, our elderly neighbour had a garden that was typical of many around here – bursting with the fruits of his labour and time – and brimming with stories of his life, this place, this landscape. Over the garden wall, Jack would tell us those stories, in his quiet way, his words softly drawn out from his memories, and spun on the ballad-lilt of his West Country accent. All along the front wall, ever-increasing crowds of daffodils reminded him of the long-past day he had spent planting those bulbs with his toddler daughter. Each spring, that shared moment would renew over and over before the eyes of both dad and daughter – evidence of belonging; past, present and future. Beautiful rose bushes punctuated other events – birthdays and anniversaries; and fuchsias blazed colour along the margin between our two front paths, to guide our footsteps home. But several years ago, Jack passed away – and his garden, his roses, his daughter’s daffodils are now all gone.

But here, this side of the wall – though we don’t gift our front garden the time and effort Jack spent on his – we’re holding to a little mantra that keeping it, letting it breathe, gives something to the landscape and brings many rewards – not least a better view than the back-end of a car bumper from our kitchen window…

But best of all, is the wildlife it attracts. The jackdaws, along with many other birds, love our little “lawn”. It’s a ragged, hybrid mix of grass and “weeds” with messy edges and long sprouting tufts of grass against the wall, full of insects, whirring with grasshoppers in the summer – even a frog or two sometimes.

A few years ago, we were faced with the necessity of big disability adaptations to our house for our son. During all those long months of building work, the front lawn inevitably became torn to shreds by skips, piles of bricks and breezeblock, and afterwards we had to re-seed to restore the grass. It’s taken a couple of years for that to find its equilibrium – but, it won’t be long before, with encouragement and planting, it will have regained something of its old character. In the years just before our building work, springtime outbreaks of primroses and cowslips graced that ragged patch of green – and many a time, I would glance out of the window to see a passer-by given a visible lift as they caught sight of them. Their yellow exuberance hardly ever failed to raise a smile.

Smiles, interest and entertainment are often provided during my washing up hours, courtesy of the jackdaws, as they sidle around that small green space with their tip-and-stalk gait. They are both comical and deadly serious, both gentle and keenly ready for life’s difficult business.

The most arresting thing about them is their eyes – piercing blue and full of intelligence. They have a don’t-mess-with-me glint, whilst enclosing a whole world of tribal bird knowledge…

… all carried off with a demeanour that shrugs off the day’s moments with humour, whilst still pinning each one with close attention.

If we humans could pin the turning of the earth’s moments with that kind of close attention, maybe we would leave more room to lay them bare and breathing – to give the soil space amongst all the block-paving and tarmac – ready to open up to the circling of herons overhead, the glint of a watching bird’s eye, the blackbird wrestling with a worm, the daffodils planted by a child’s hand, guided by her dad to meet the earth, over half a century ago.

Perhaps we could tune in better to the very rhythm of living itself, and let our words and stories align with an old and – if we’ll let it – ever-renewing ballad.

The ‘blue-buzzed haze’ and passing days…

Amidst all the rain this May Bank Holiday weekend, Sunday 6th opened a window of sunshine – so we grabbed our chance, headed out to Westonbirt Arboretum…

And stepped through into this…

It’s so difficult, via a photo or words, to convey the sheer sensuousness of being amongst bluebells. Almost impossible to convey the intensity of colour, the subtle layers of scent; the stunning effect as you turn a corner and see them there, spread at the feet of moss-rimed oaks – or splashed across the grass, gleaming in the light…

‘And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes’

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the serenely beautiful video clip below, Robert Macfarlane sits in a Billericay bluebell wood and responds to these lines from The May Magnificat. He reflects on how he came to fully understand Manley Hopkins’ words, and to appreciate the accuracy of their imagery; how they capture that effect of ‘aqueous shimmer’ and ‘marine wash’ (Macfarlane’s own description) when you walk and sit amongst bluebells.

Reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (one of the most deeply mesmerising books I’ve ever encountered) is like experiencing a kind of meditation – an underworld of deep thought. This clip is from The Wild Places of Essex - a televisual accompaniment to Macfarlane’s book, and part of the BBC’s Natural World series back in 2010. It gives a flavour of that mesmerising quality of Macfarlane’s nature writing, and provides a visual feast of ‘blue-buzzed haze’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins again):

Bluebells are one of the specialities of the British Isles, our (blue) icing on the biodiversity cake. More sparsely present in continental Europe and absent elsewhere, they are a national – a world – treasure. We are guardians of around half the world’s population of Hyacinthoides non-scripta. It’s so easy to take things for granted. Even within the very essence of the bluebells’ transience, we feel a trust in their never-ending return.

Trust, familiarity, noticing. Do they always go together? Today, in flower all around us, there’s a very common plant indeed – one hardly ever heeded – which is also putting on a fine display.

The bright yellow shaggy manes of dandelions are spread out in the sun, with the occasional seed clock counting its time until the breeze breaks up its perfect globe.

For me, it is a plant so bound up with my childhood; with handstands on scruffy lawns; with tree-camps on the wild edges of playing fields; with searching out its jagged, pungent leaves so beloved by pet guinea pigs; and with gently blowing the time away on the wind… There’s so much, even the most commonplace, that we would miss if it were gone.

‘Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers come to dust’

…writes Shakespeare in Cymbeline. Those ‘chimney sweepers’ (dandelion clocks) are an image of passing time embedded, from our earliest days, in our consciousness and culture…

Here in Silk Wood (the arboretum’s ancient woodland) – this April/May window of emerging leaf canopy, and tree-scattered light, not only belongs to the bluebells – but is also the moment when the early purple orchids step forward and come into bloom. After carefully keeping a lookout for them in likely places, the first one we see creeps up on us from behind, jumping into my vision as I idly glance up from admiring an “elven doorway” amidst the moss.

When we follow the path round to the woodland edge, we find, as we did last year, that hosts of early purples are thriving in the grassy clearing maintained for their benefit.

And we discover more in other clearings and on the wildflower meadow rides, where we have also found them in previous years:

Early purple orchid, Orchis mascula

Earlier today, we noticed the leaves of other orchids emerging from the soil – common spotted:

…and twayblades:

We sit on a bench for a while, jumping to our feet when we hear the yaffling call of a green woodpecker immediately behind us. We don’t manage to get a glimpse of the “Yaffle,” but moments later a great spotted woodpecker lands in the tree above our bench. It’s very far up, but I point the camera towards it on maximum zoom, and hope for the best:

With the naked eye, and through binoculars, we get wonderful views of its black, white and red plumage as it fidgets and shifts along the branches.

Deeper in the ancient woodland, among tree stumps transforming into fantastic, fairy tale sculptures…

…we come across a single white bluebell

and a male orange tip butterfly is busy feeding nearby:

Orange tip butterfly (male), Anthocharis cardamines

On April Fools’ Day, on the same path – almost on the same spot – I managed to get this picture of a comma butterfly:

Comma butterfly, Polygonia c-album

And just around the corner, almost a year ago to the day, I photographed this rather ragged red admiral basking in the late April sun:

Red admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta

…whilst nearby, this beautiful peacock butterfly was feeding on those wonderful, nectar providing dandelions:

Peacock butterfly, Inachis io

Today, we are accompanied by the call of a chiffchaff, whilst all around, the birdsong is swollen by other recently arrived summer migrants, adding their voices to those of the resident birds. All along the edge of a plantation, there are clumps of stitchwort – and also water avens, bowing its meekly folded petals:

Water avens, Geum rivale

Lots of bugle is in flower everywhere and we find some red campion flowering too. And out in the damper, grassy areas of Silk Wood, lady’s smock – food plant for orange tip butterfly caterpillars – is also in flower. We pause to admire it, whilst two orange tips, a male and a female, flutter in courtship above the windmill whirls of pink flowers:

Lady’s smock (cuckoo flower), Cardamine pratensis

Tiny, fresh green hazel leaves are brewing energy for their future fruits, and the cherry blossom is still blousy against the blue sky. Last year, the blossom burst into spectacular, candyfloss profusion after the previous harsh winter – and gave a display that made the very earth seem to hum with bees:

On a high bank, a false oxlip is in flower, though now past its best… But, again, by the magic of time travel, a photo taken on this bank in May 2009 can whisk you back to when we managed to catch a previous year’s incarnation in a moment of full glory:

On the same bank, and on the arboretum’s downs, cowslips are in flower:

Cowslip, Primula veris

Beside some beech trees at the woodland edge, more twayblades are scattered profusely through the dog’s mercury, their flowers still bunched low, tight and closed, waiting their time.

And on the path where ramsons rule, their deep, damp wild garlic aroma fills the air. They are just beginning to unwrap their starry flowers:

– but soon they will fully reveal, in turn, their moment of stunning glory, when this path will be an avenue of billowing white.

Now, as the day – and our window of sunshine - begins to close, we watch swallows and house martins dash and twist in the sky. And a whole succession of moments lingers around us, blowing through the passing of the years – like the seed from those dandelion clocks, so perfect and waiting; playing their part in the cycle of things…

A Peace of Nature

‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees…. while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.’    John Muir

‘I am a little piece of nature.’   Albert Einstein

 

Utter calm. Often, it appears unexpectedly and by chances, stealing in when you think it’s somewhere else. It’s not easy to come by. But it was there that day – not in a deep, remote landscape, but in Bath’s Botanical Gardens, with the sound of the Easter holiday fun fair thumping persistently from Victoria Park.

That elusive peace enfolded us – my husband, daughter and me – as we sat on a bench, watching the spring sunlight pulse its reflection amongst the leaves over the pool, just letting the life of the gardens come to us…

In the early afternoon, with the morning cloud dissolved, and the blue skies of the preceding days restored, we weren’t the only ones enjoying the warmth and awakening earth in that hidden corner. Above us, by the ‘Temple of Minerva,’ where a natural spring glints the spare-coin offerings of passing wish-makers, a woodpigeon cooled itself in the cascade – and a dunnock splashed amongst the lower tiers of rock.

Earlier, the dunnock had sprung from the ground to the top of the bush close beside me, threading the air with its clear, piercing notes, marking its territory. Now, a male blackbird torpedoed the underside of the leaves overhanging the pool, picking off an insect as it made contact. As he landed, another male blackbird collided into his space, assessed his dilemma, twitched in an uneasy stand-off, stood his ground for a second and then startled away.

Blackbird photographed at the same spot by the pool in Bath Botanical Gardens, June 2010.

In the tree tops, blue tits swung and hopped from branch to branch, busy in constant conversation with each other. A couple of long-tailed tits emerged from a bush, like little pendulums balanced on the ends of branches. And then, above us in the vegetation by the cascade, we caught sight of our first orange tip butterfly of the year. It tumbled downwards, circled and then rose, like a visual representation of thought-patterns; playing out a dance of forgetting then remembering. And, all this time, the trees resounded with birdsong – enough to fill the mind’s focus, and to dismiss the thudding vibrations from the fun fair music and rides.

All around the gardens, the magnolia trees were in full bloom, their old branches twisting in a controlled, contorted dance. Holding up their flowers like cups offered to the sky, their petals spilled to the ground – and everywhere tree blossom buzzed with bees and drifted around us like pink snow. Earlier, we had lingered in the wildflower area – loving the chance to see snake’s head fritillaries. They were almost over with their flowering – reminding me that another year’s opportunity for a visit to Cricklade Meadow, to see them in the wild, would soon be slipping away…

But, for now, no matter; these park cousins are beautiful.

Snake's Head Fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris

Within the metal railings that encircle these gardens, nature is packed in, brimming with colour and variety, like the concentrated contents of a tin of assorted sweets. Sitting by the pool, the usual nagging inner voices and thoughts, for once, have shut up – for a brief time. It feels so good to sit here, in this little piece of nature, unwinding through the pulse of the day – and to unfurl, like the leaf buds around us, from the winter.

From our bench, we can glimpse the head and arms of Lee Dickson’s tree sculpture, Mankind’s Hand in Nature, similarly unfurling towards the sky through the vegetation.

Around seven metres tall, it rises from the ground, keeping alive the spirit of the sequoia from which it is carved.

The tree, one of the original twelve giant redwoods to be brought to Britain in the 1850s, sadly succumbed to honey fungus in recent years, and Lee Dickson, a local chainsaw sculptor from Radstock, was commissioned in 2001 to create the sculpture as a celebration of the tree’s life and place in the gardens.

And these gardens certainly are a place to celebrate life; to come to for peace and repose, and to fit back into nature’s cycles. We were here the week before too, with our son. Pushing his wheelchair as close to the railings as we could get, we watched the huge koi carp glide silently in the pool…

…and greeted a moorhen rushing through the light…

…before wandering through the gardens and Victoria Park, past the daffodils and blossom…

…past the flowering lesser celandine and violets…

…to Bath Abbey Churchyard to listen to the buskers.

On the Abbey’s face, the angels were engaged in their endless climb…

- and fall…

…on the ladder to heaven.

But it wasn’t a day for falling angels.

…Too much earthy life emerging – too much of the turn of the planet – all around and in our selves.

 

…And that seems an appropriate cue for a song that’s been our son’s favourite since he was tiny; his ‘magic song’ with the power to soothe like none other:

Follow the Heron by Karine Polwart

‘The back of the winter is broken
And light lingers long by the door
And the seeds of the summer have spoken
In gowans that bloom on the shore…’

It’s a beautiful celebration of both an outer and inner transition into spring. That cusp and co-existence of ‘ice’ (or in the case of today’s weather here, lots of rain!) and growing light… Enjoy!

Darkness shedding light…

One night during the weeks approaching Winter Solstice, I took to bed one of my favourite books, Findings by Kathleen Jamie, and re-read its opening essay, Darkness and Light.

 

Settling down in that long night to lose myself in Kathleen Jamie’s clear-seeing prose was a small, anticipatory celebration of that magical tipping point of darkness and light. A welcoming of the special qualities of both, at a time of year that is like a retreat and an embrace; a time to reflect, take stock, evaluate and wonder.

The winter light filling those days around the solstice was something to celebrate. It had brought gifts of form and clarity; a glow that held things close. It had had a sense of enclosure about it – as if, in each day, we were held in a tight, intense moment; our attention gathered near to watch intently those things closer to home. Those bitterly cold, but gleaming days were parcelled up in darkness, wrapped in shaded edges that defined their very qualities. Precious and brief, the light they cast entered windows with a muted whiteness that was like the telling of a secret tucked in its shadows.

One blue, bright morning…

… I had stood bathed in sunlight at the top of our stairs, and watched as its beams passed through a crystal ornament standing on the window sill, transforming the walls with bursts of vivid rainbows. Each was a perfect, intense spectrum; those huddling colours like a magic spell conjured out of the chill.

In Darkness and Light, Kathleen Jamie writes about these days around the winter solstice:

‘Mid-December, the still point of the turning year. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening into a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close.’

‘I like the precise gestures of the sun……everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark.’

At around 4 p.m. on the night of my re-read, my daughter had called me urgently to the dining room window. A flock (we counted eleven) of long-tailed tits had jinked through the dusk to cluster on our garden fat feeders, their tails overlapping in elegant criss-crossing lines, their white and black markings exaggerated in the gloom, and their pink blush washed to sepia, as if caught in the glow of an old two-tone photograph. After a few moments of peck, shift, peck, flit, they huddled and separated and clustered again in a purposeful communal fidget. With urgent, constant communication they finished their hasty meal, and headed towards the big old trees in the gardens behind ours. Darkness was falling rapidly, graining the sky grey. They needed to find their roost for the night. The cold air was closing like a tight fist. Lights were beaming from the windows, spilling in pools. The long-tails flew beyond the reach of the light, seeking the shadows.

‘I imagined travelling into the dark. Northward – so it got darker as I went. I’d a notion to sail at night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. I had been asking around among literary people, readers of books, for instances of dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that’s wicked, but could find few. It seems to me that our cherished metaphor of darkness is wearing out…… Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness are we not?’

- Kathleen Jamie, Findings (published by Sort Of Books, distributed by Penguin Group)

In her essay, Kathleen Jamie takes us with her on her travels to Maes Howe on Orkney. Her hope is to witness the setting winter solstice sun beam directly along the passageway of the Neolithic burial chamber, casting its light onto the tomb’s back wall. What she sees there is a connection between ancient and modern – between human ingenuity, and our relationships to darkness and light – played out in a surprising way.

Even in the very midst of Christmas parcel wrapping, I came across another pertinent exploration of the nature of the dark, in Luke Jennings’  Blood Knots – of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing, which I had bought for a friend who loves fishing. I’d heard great things about the lyrical beauty of the book and its nature writing – and, unable to resist dipping into the first couple of chapters before wrapping it, I was soon captivated by Luke Jennings’ description of urban fishing at night. Fishing itself doesn’t hold any attraction for me, but as an amateur naturalist, I recognise the sense of focus and fusion with landscape; the close, relished mystery of wild lives – the mystery of life itself – unseen around us:

‘My world has contracted to a box of darkness: to walls, the towpath and the black of the water. As always, there’s the temptation to wind in the bait a little, to check that it’s OK, but that way madness lies, because you’ll never really know what’s happening down there.

Nor would you want to, because in an over-illuminated world, a world whose dark corners are in constant retreat from the remorseless, banal march of progress, this not knowing is a thing to be valued and enjoyed.’

– From Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic Books)

During the Yuletide lead-up, I watched Rick Stein’s Cornish Christmas programmes on BBC2. In one episode, he interviewed Tim Smit, CEO of the Eden Project, who mused on the rich pagan and Christian mix of our midwinter festival, and also on the lighting of candles at this time. He reflected how there is something about candlelight that encourages words – makes us want to talk, share intimate conversation. It’s just occurred to me now, writing this, that the intimate sense of enclosure candlelight creates, is the same intimacy which that brief, parcelled-up light of winter gives to what we see around us. That sense of focus and centre, depth and pause. It’s a light by which to huddle, and share stories.

But the solstice also makes us look outwards on a whole planetary level – it can stretch our imagination far out to those huge workings of the Universe, the tilt and movement of the Earth, the progress of the seasons, the changes in our night skies…

In the November 2010 issue of the RSPB’s Birds magazine, there is a lovely article by Conor Jameson entitled Seasons to be Cheerful. In it he talks about the birds’ responses to the seasons – and about how many birds and other creatures ‘…make light of planetary distance and treat the globe as their home, and the galaxy as their sat nav.’

Conor Jameson goes on to say:

‘Each year, the Earth in a sense ‘breathes in’ from the autumn equinox to the spring equinox and ‘breathes out’ from the spring to the autumn. Time-lapsed footage of this really does make the planet look like it is breathing. Imagine then the world’s birds moving in response to that inhalation, that sheet of ice, snow and cold air easing them south in autumn, and drawing them back north again in the spring, at an estimated 5 mph, as it retreats.’

I love that idea – and the beautiful, all encompassing image it conjures…

This time of year brings many gifts – not least the thirteen redwings, blown in by the snow from the outlying fields, seeking food in our garden! On December 20th, they swept over our hedge and adorned our damson trees like elegant sentinels, their red-streaked sides in full blush against the white sky – causing both delight in our household, and ruffled feathers amongst the starling flock already perched on the branches! The redwings continued to fly round and round the gardens, tumbling into and out of our trees throughout the day – and on the winter solstice itself – adding more magic to that time. The winter before, the snow brought fieldfares to our garden. They stayed for a few days, ate the apples we put out for them, and enchanted us with their beauty:

As Conor Jameson goes on to say in his Birds magazine article:

‘A northern winter has much to cherish. Without it, there would be no fieldfares and redwings arriving in squadrons from Scandinavia, no geese from Greenland descending on our western shores, nor whooper swans on our eastern fields, magically, overnight. There would be fewer robins and blackbirds visiting our back gardens to see what we’ve got for them here in our temperate, ocean-insulated island group.’

On New Year’s Eve, I opened the front door at dusk, and was greeted by a calm mildness on the air that felt like an early out-breath from the Earth. On that breath, emerging from the deepening shadows, curled the leisurely, fluting song of a blackbird…

In those very last days of 2010, and in the earliest of 2011, the passing of the solstice and the slightly lengthening days awoke more and more birdsong. On January 2nd, I opened the bathroom window to let out some steam, and the room was instantly flooded by a cacophony of birds. And this week, I’ve noticed that the blackbirds in the garden have paired up, and the male is busy chasing off a rival (so, high drama on the lawn!) Two robins have also paired up, and are hanging around the garden together, and in February, frog spawn will adorn our neighbours’ ponds. Whatever the weather brings over these next few weeks, out of that bud of cold and darkness, spring is already unfolding…

Happy New Year!

Kent, Orchids, Belonging – (and the small infinities of Poem-Places)

From the end of May, through the first week of June, I was back in the county of my birth and upbringing – Kent; land of hops, orchards, nightingales and, as my Northumbrian husband says, of a million shades of green…

Within a day of being back there, I had taken root again – physically as well as in spirit. Wherever I am, my roots reach out for the memory of Kent – but, being physically back there, everything realigns itself, my tap roots travel downward, and the shape of me rediscovers where it fits the puzzle.

And it is the trees of Kent that have a lot to do with that – the sheer number and variety and extent of them; the ancient woodlands that give the place its special spirit and make me feel I’m back in my ‘right’ habitat.

A book in which I can capture that feeling wherever I am, is my treasured copy of Elaine Franks’ The Undercliff, A Sketchbook of the Axmouth – Lyme Regis Nature Reserve (published by J.M. Dent & Sons):

Elaine Franks’ beautiful illustrations, so full of the life of an English wood, always transport me to that ‘right’ habitat – and the book’s foreword, written by John Fowles (of French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus fame), is a treat in itself. As well as being an extremely accomplished novelist, Fowles was a passionate lifelong naturalist, and in the book’s foreword he captures, for me, that sense of the ‘rightness’ of place; of the return to a wild world where the tuning realigns to ‘as it should be’; all the notes in perfect pitch with our own deepest nature. He writes that the Undercliff, the extraordinary nature reserve near where he lived in Dorset’s Lyme Regis is:

‘…quite simply one of those places one always thinks of as one does of a poem or piece of music; not quite of this world; or, of this world as it should be, but alas so largely isn’t.’

For me, Kent is a place full of such poem-places, made all the more potent through their connection to my most formative years. During our holiday exploring those small, and yet vast, places of childhood memory, the woodlands were always a framework, gently easing us in and out of the lilt and change of the landscape as we travelled.

Walking along the North Downs Way on a hot early June day, we explored the edges of different worlds – crossing the line where the open chalk downland emerges from the green shadows of yew and beech, like a blaze of white-green heat, sparking the blue of butterfly wings (holly and common blues) and the yellow-red flames of birdsfoot trefoil. Such places are a botanist’s dream; every square inch stuffed with plant delights, many so tiny it’s a must to get your nose near the earth and alter your world focus to the microscopic. Moving my mind beyond the edge of usual perspective, that tiny world seems to expand into a whole universe, and I become lost in a new shift of seeing; a perspective made of that simplicity and enormity held in the palm of the opening of William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

My parameters of perception always play and shift in this way whenever I come across wild orchids – those jewels of the Kentish woods and downs. There is earth magic in these little shape-shifters. They are strange, exotic and yet so belonging to that ‘right’ familiarity of the world as it should be. They are full of character, beauty and attitude – alive like animate creatures in their mimicry of bees, flies; in their hallucinatory resemblances to imaginary ladies in crinolines, monkeys, soldiers and lizards; in the uncanny accident of botanical features grinning at us like impish faces, triggering fond sympathy in our brains. When you peer up close, focusing in on ‘the infinity’ in the texture of their petals, you can see that their surfaces are often like the wings of butterflies – iridescent, sparkling with the glitter of light. I am completely held by their spell – a total devotee.

I have yet to read any of John Fowles’ novels (something I must rectify – and soon!) but ever since I discovered that he was a passionate naturalist, truly bitten by the wild orchid bug, I’ve felt a kindred spirit waits in his writing. Once you have been bitten by that bug, it is like a drug; the fascination must be fed. Kent is a treasure trove of orchids; famously the county of Darwin’s ‘Orchis Bank,’ where those inspirational plants, so like little worlds in themselves, played a huge part in the development of his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like many plant species, the orchids seemed to be flowering late this year after our heavy winter, so, having missed seeing any early purple orchids near where we live in the West Country, we hoped to see some still in flower in the South East.

With great good luck, our walk around some Kentish cobnut platts scattered that orchid magic our way on the very first day of our holiday. The cobnut platts were like a time portal to a bygone era of farming – like walking into the pages of an H.E. Bates novel – and beneath the cobnut trees, little groups of early purple orchids stood tall, and very much still in flower:

 along with the more greenly inconspicuous Common Twayblade:

 

Amongst the orchids were vetches and this Broomrape:

…The whole place alive with the freedom of an ancient habitat allowed to unfold its true rhythms over and over again…

Dormice apparently thrive here – and we could see the trails made by badgers. Interspersed between the cobnuts were big old orchard trees, lichen draped and insect busy – and in the nearby woodland, we were met by drifts of yellow archangel, vivid blue bugle, red campion,

many more twayblades:

the delicate stars of ramsons, filling the air with their wild garlic aroma…

…And, finding our way through the mix of vigorous growth and life-giving decay of fallen trees (casualties maybe from the 1987 Great Storm), we discovered yet more clusters of early purple orchids, one the shade of raspberry ripple ice cream:

Illustration of Early Purple Orchid from 'The Undercliff' by Elaine Franks

Amongst the moss and fungi and all the buzzing decay and pulse of unfolding life of this ancient wood, we walked along another edge of worlds – a ridge of a sharp fall-away into the valley below:

Such ridges are a familiar feature of these local woodlands, and this one had the characteristics of an ancient boundary – a faded hollow ditch, marked along by a line of coppiced trees – a mix of the cathedral skyward soar of beech and the crazy twist of hornbeam. These ancient woods are definitely poem-places; places to go to dream, to alter focus; to find ‘the world as it should be’.

One such place of past daily daydreams (and many a discovery of small-world infinities) was a tiny fragment of wildwood around the corner from my childhood home. On the final day of our holiday, my daughter (ace orchid spotter!) found more orchids in the grassy rides close by that wood – this time common spotted orchids; a selection of the usual pink:

 … and one pure white:

Returning through the wood itself, memories thronged. This is where my ever-ongoing journey to learning my wildflowers began, where I built camps with my brother and friends, fished for tiddlers in the nearby stream, where I walked my dog, long since gone with my childhood – and where I sat on a huge, fallen tree in chattering companionship with my best friend, each of us nursing the nettle stings on our legs and feeling happily lost in that ‘eternity’ of this small space of the wild.

Now, as we walked, each little landmark prompted another memory, a familiarity of sympathy and home. I reached out my hand and laid it against one of the big old oaks in silent recognition of an old friend. My rational side tells me this is a one-way greeting; that tree, that little wood, doesn’t care whether I’m there or not – has no sense of having seen me before. But, for a moment, it felt like some kind of pact between me and this place – a pact to always feel connected. My rational side tells me this pact is in my mind alone, but another part of me likes to believe in some spirit of a place in which there’s a mutual echo of recognition, and an acceptance of belonging.

I think maybe that’s what we all need – especially in this modern world where we wander and break away and have so little chance to settle; so little chance to find that world as it should be.

The Swifts have ‘made it again’

They’re back! Tumbling through the blue sky above our garden…

My first sighting of swifts this year!

At about mid-day today, I was hanging out the washing in a dreamy, basking-in-the-sunshine sort of way - a speckled wood butterfly fluttering close to my feet – when I heard the swifts call. Not that full scream, spread out across the sky like a banner – but a faint, familiar, busy, bubble of sound tossed between them in the air far above.

Instantly, I snapped awake – and jerked my head back to see three, then five altogether, tumbling, turning, glimmering way up in that liquid, clear blue.

I thought I heard swifts overhead last Friday; just the briefest of calls. But it was raining and very overcast, and when I scanned the sky I could see no sign… so, either I’d made a mistake – or they were there, hidden above the low, white curtain of cloud…

But now, I’ve seen them for sure! They’ve definitely returned! And the uplift of that moment is incredible – as it is every year.  All the nature lovers I know start buzzing with it – passing on the mantra: “They’re back!” – a shorthand everyone instantly understands.

Ted Hughes captures that moment, that feeling – and the pure essence of swifts (in description, and in the very movement and rhythm of the words) – to utter perfection:

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialise at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries.
      Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
                                  They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come –

 - From Swifts by Ted Hughes.

… My much-read copy of the poem lives in this volume, published by Faber and Faber, and wonderfully illustrated by Raymond Briggs; a volume my daughter bought for me one birthday. A perfect book for the generations to share:

Wordsworth and those ‘Spots of Time’

 

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen

- William Wordsworth, The Prelude. Book 12. 208-218 (1850 edition)

I’ve been re-visiting bits of Wordsworth’s The Prelude recently – plus several of his shorter poems – and am finding, more than ever, what an antidote to jaded feeling those poems are. There’s something about Wordsworth’s poetry that stirs up your inner world – swirls through  the heart of your thoughts and self – and settles everything back down in its rightful place, refreshed and restored.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

 - William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us – (1807)

We need an inner restorative against the ‘fretful stir’ and ‘fever of the world’; a place where memory connects us to the moments when we felt most alive (and perhaps most connected to wider Nature); where we felt the narrative of our truest self – or the self we most want to be – shift into place, take shape. Where maybe, even, we felt that ‘serene and blessed mood’ described by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey:

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened…

and ‘We see into the life of things.’

Memory facilitates our own stories and, the older I get, the more active and busy my own ‘spots of time’ seem to be. There is a more insistent chiming, too, of these memories, new events, things said and things read. All the time, there are connections. Multiplying, reaching further – increasing in resonance.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth writes of his return, after an absence of five years, to his ‘wild and secluded scene’ where the ‘steep and lofty cliffs…connect/ The landscape with the quiet of the sky’ and delights in that landscape and his personal connection to it:

                                These beauteous forms,
Through long absence have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owned to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart

A ‘renovating’ moment my mind has often turned to in times of dead-end ‘weariness,’ is a special, snowy day spent with my husband when we first met. We escaped the city, and wandered Padley and Yarncliff Woods in the Peak District. Those woods were magical places, full of mossy rocks and gnarled, ancient oaks; a place from a fairy tale or from Middle Earth. I loved their atmosphere of deep age and waiting – enhanced that day by the silence of snow. Recently, I met that woodland again (well…one that, though not exactly alike, echoed with reminders of it) within the pages of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

 …a deep forest, densely overgrown,
with ancient oaks in huddles of hundreds
and vaulting hills above each half of the valley.
Hazel and hawthorn are interwoven,
decked and draped in damp, shaggy moss…

- (Fitt II, 741-5, translated by Simon Armitage – published by Faber and Faber Ltd)

                                       
                                    … Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood

 - The Prelude, Book 12, 223-4 (1850 ed.) 

From my earliest years, there are the deep memories of the North Downs. Mind pictures of the astonishingly huge Roman snails, clinging to the rain washed chalk; of the towering beech trees and shadowed yews, watching like knowing ancients. When I was a child, those hills seemed outside the rest of the world; an old, magic land wrapped close round the modern housing estate where we lived.

Just a step away from the pavements, rows of front doors, kids on bikes – there was this place of glimpses; hidden, hushed and full of happening. It was a land of wild creatures, and of stories – and the overlap of Time. There, I could wonder at the dart and slink of a fox, peer along trails made by badgers, and follow the ghosts of travellers along the old hollow ways; my steps falling on footprints hidden in layers long since worn away. Pilgrims had passed that way for centuries en route to Canterbury; and when, years later, I came to read the vivid tales of the Miller, the Wife of Bath and their ‘..compaignye/ Of sundry folk’ – I accompanied those characters on ‘my’ path along ‘my’ Downs, whilst Chaucer wove his magic.

Frequently now, whilst mind-drifting through ‘trivial occupations,’ scenes from novels (often those read many years ago) will unexpectedly pop into my head. Some secret synaptic connection between recent life events, and those past bookish moments, will fire into life; sometimes with flashes of new understanding and relevance; sometimes as a fond reflection on old favourites, to lighten the task in hand. Certain books are melded to various stages of life – they are the shapers and the keepers, forever related to those ‘spots of time.’ But they also endlessly make new connections; bringing new significance as experience grows, and as life and page continually overlap. Books, in several ways, become spots of time themselves.

Often, when in (a kind of) ‘vacant…mood,’ loading the washing machine, or during some other automatic-pilot task (there never seems to be much opportunity for lying on couches!) a special memory will ‘flash,’ like Wordsworth’s daffodils, upon my ‘inward eye.’ A mind-vision of a well-loved clearing in an ancient wood in Kent – a place to stand in wonder, surrounded by ‘hosts’ of wild orchids:

Lady Orchid, Orchis purpurea

Greater Butterfly Orchid, Platanthera chlorantha

A few years ago, when I returned to that wood (after a twelve year absence and a lot of life changes) it was for me, in my own small way, a Tintern Abbey moment; an emotional collide of my past and present self, in a place that means so much to me. That day contained, like Wordsworth’s return to the hills above Tintern Abbey, a complex comfort; a celebration and a ‘sad perplexity’ – and something perhaps, ‘Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.’ A moment where the self settles with a feeling of both homecoming and significant change; a complex, emotional interplay of past and present – and a tug between loss and gain, limits and possibilities, regrets and inspirations.

And so it goes on. Moments constantly chime – across life and literature, interweaving in memory and experience; in what we ‘half create/ And what perceive.’ A constantly developing process of connections that ‘spread like day.’

Stories in Rocking Horse Attics…

Maundy Thursday in the beautiful city of Bath was a day of shifting spring sunshine and a pouncing April Fool wind. Swathes of daffodils shivered in Victoria Park, lesser celandines were opening their petals beneath stately trees…

Lesser Celandine, Ranunculus ficaria

…and we, via Royal Crescent, The Circus (and no doubt the route of many a Jane Austen stroll) were on our way to The Paragon – and our first ever visit to  Topping & Co. booksellers

As we approached the pale blue shop front, we caught tantalising first glimpses through its windows – warm light, lingering readers, towering walls of books, beautiful wood floors – and then the door was closing behind us, and it was like entering a gentle fold of time, back to the bookshops of my childhood…

All around us, floor to ceiling, there was a vast selection of titles; row upon row of backlist volumes as well as current bestsellers, a discerning variety and breadth of choice wherever you looked. The natural history section was a rare treat in itself – packed full of carefully chosen titles spanning years of the best nature writing, not just the latest releases or TV tie-ins. Here was an ideal roll call of writers – a lovely selection of titles by Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and all the others you would wish to see represented there. It was wonderful to see the New Nature Writing issue of Granta tucked between them, completing the picture.

For a long while, I browsed in the children’s section and marvelled at the beautiful display of hardback gift books. It was a feast of magic for the eyes. Spines of sumptuous red, green, blue or inky black – gold blocked and cloth-bound volumes, all primed to begin their journeys through the lives of generations of readers to come. Heirlooms waiting for a home…

My eye was particularly drawn to a gorgeous cloth-bound volume, containing Susan Cooper’s complete The Dark is Rising sequence; a gem of an edition which I’ve not seen anywhere else – and, until now, never knew existed. It was so heart warming to see this fitting tribute to how special these books are – a gem for a gem, made to be treasured.

There’s something about storybooks like these, especially when gathered together in such numbers – that speaks of magic libraries in mysterious, Green Knowe houses; volumes waiting to be read in rocking horse attics, or in secret gardens – or on Gyptian ships bound for Svalbard…

My daughter’s eyes were shining as she drank it all in. Everywhere we looked our gaze fell on abundant treasures. Bookshops like Topping’s feel such an organic part of the journey of reading. They intensify the whole sensory and tactile experience, so that even before ‘Once Upon a Time,’ the discovery and anticipation begin.

The only way we’re going to keep these special places, and the experience they offer, is to spend money in them – so, as my daughter had some saved up Christmas money, she was able to make her selection from the ‘magic library.’

She chose this beautiful Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition of a well loved favourite, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty:

Her old second hand paperback copy has all but fallen apart after many a bumpy rucksack journey to school – so this will be her treasure-copy, living long on her shelves for repeated readings (I can almost see those imaginary great-grandkids turning these pages in years to come!)

On its first journey home as heirloom-in-waiting, Black Beauty was joined by Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell (my daughter’s other choice from Topping’s shelves)  – plus quite a hoard of other books which, earlier in the day, we’d bought with our stash of chain-store gift tokens left over from Christmas:

I’m looking forward to reading the Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson (I loved the gripping storytelling and Woman in White, gothic feel of Fingersmith. And Kate Atkinson is a firm favourite, always providing a sparkling festival of fiction delights) but I’m sure I’ll be borrowing some of my daughter’s choices too!  

We’ll definitely be back to Topping’s whenever we get the chance. In fact, I can feel the pull to return there already. Our Rocking Horse Attic is just an imaginary one – but that gorgeous edition of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series definitely belongs there, I think…