I worked in a garden that was previously owned by a plant collector. It is 20 acres filled with rare shrubs from around the world. I cannot remember what this one is called, although I was told. And told I’ll probably never see one again.
My arms are scratched from weeding a bed of roses. When I close my eyes I see a small plant in bare earth, whorls whirling toward me. Nature is under my fingernails and in my hair.
Maybe a river or a poem.
Wow, Google, what a picture!
If you’re thinking ‘that’s a funny shaped hanger’, it was planted in 1887 for Queen Victoria in the shape of a V.
I see it as a hill-sized, arboreous, two-finger salute. I usually send one right back and blow a raspberry.
I heard a cuckoo today!
“Spanish chestnuts
huge limbs like the arms of Atlas
and the shade beneath the foliage is cool and dark as a cathedral”
I fell asleep reading
I fell asleep with these words
This old phone box
Is now a tiny library
From the springing wheat-field the lark ascends on shivering wing and, far above the world, links heaven and earth together with his slender chain of song.
Richard Gilbert
*
Over the fields
Attached to nothing
A skylark sings
Basho
May
“On the ground there are beetles and flies of astounding variety and equally marvellous beauty. Some like green opals, flashing gold fire, some metallic green, others red—a veritable jewel-box of heaven has been upset here.”
Everyman’s Sussex: the countryside in varying moods and seasons Richard Gilbert
I am the crow eating the rabbit.
Katherine said the air doesn’t yet have the full fragrance of full spring, when the breezes are full of pollens and scents.
“drugging light hearts”
Blue is the next wave of colour after yellow. Grape hyacinths and bluebells will be in every wood I walk.
“It is a strange thing, this desire to shout from the summit of the Downs. Perhaps it is because of the feeling of absolute insignificance—as if we know that, do what we will, everything would pass unnoticed in such a largeness.”
Richard Gilbert, Everyman’s Sussex: the countryside in varying moods and seasons
(I don’t shout, I sing)
April 2012 ↑ April 2013 ↓
Colours come in waves. First is yellow, when the witch hazel meets the daffodils, the gorse goes like billyo and the fields of rape bloom.
The woods are still bare like winter. All I saw today was a patch of wood anemones.
I heard lambs bleeting but couldn’t see them through the mist. It felt like a sea mist. It came from Brighton and made it as far as the northern escarpment of the downs, where it rolled over the edge and turned into nothing.
*
My nan is unwell and thinks that my grandad is still alive. She cooks dinner for him and telephones to ask when he is coming home. We have been advised to always correct her, tell her that grandad died years ago.
I am a coward and I can never bring myself to say it. I can’t break it to my nan that my grandad is dead.
*
My Ladybird Book of British Wild Flowers wants to be a poet:
Wood Sorrel
Hardly ever grows to a greater height than three inches.
The white flowers are sometimes tinged with lilac,
and are solitary; that is,
there is only one flower on each slender stalk.
They close up shortly after sunset,
and are then almost impossible to see.
The Wood Sorrel flowers from April to June,
and is very common in woods throughout Britain.
In towns and cities they are obscured and dwarfed by buildings, but in the countryside they are kings. They dominate fields and woods. They march across vales.
