Gloomy as it may look, this is the garden today – cold and damp in the rising wind, but livened by a pheasant I’ve just chased away from the bird feeder. In spite of the cold – and forecast of snow – there’s an air of expectation about it. Birds are significantly noisier than they were, and there seems to be some serious jockeying for territory. The leafy plant is angelica, poised and ready, and snowdrops are emerging from the leaf litter I cleared away yesterday. The woodland bed is looking as if it has come through the winter well so far, with primroses, violets, and cyclamen looking well, and this beauty

seems to be surviving, in spite of the everyone walking over it all last summer, to prune or cut hedges.

I wanted to post this picture, because betony is one of the candidates for the fifth herb  – attorlaðe the ‘plague-defier’, next one up in the posts about the Nine herbs charm. I am not happy with this identification, as I’ll discuss when we get there, and even less happy about the default option, cockspur grass. I had an alternative suggestion, but it will have to wait. Deadlines are catching up with me, and there won’t be another Charm post until after StAnza, which this year is very early in March. This may be a blessing in disguise, as someone has pointed me in the direction of an actual medical use for cockspur grass, so when I get a moment, I’m going to have to follow it up, along with a reference I heard on the radio to a healer of the benedicaria tradition from Sicily coming to England in the sixteenth century to study, only to find herself tried as a witch. (Who invited her? Where did she think she was going to study? There was mention of a university connection —) The herbal tradition is much more fascinating than the stereotypes would lead you to believe!

In the meantime I have just heard that the first two cantos of my long poem, The Wren in the Ash Tree, will be included in the next book from The Dark Mountain Project, The Ends of the World. It is due out in May, and if it is even half as good as their most recent volume, Poetics, it will be a wonderful thing to be involved with. This is a really exciting and encouraging way to start 2017.