BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Walking the territory

Halfway Through August already?

Yes, it is. The festivals are on in Edinburgh, the grandchildren are back to school (oldest for the last time, good grief!)There are apples ripening on the tree and my social media is full of posts about blackberries and fungi. Swifts are gone, the first wasps and house spiders are beginning to show themselves, and we have three (3!) tomatoes in the greenhouse. I’m going to have to find some form of heating for the late springs and cold wet pretendy summers we are probably going to see from now on.

I am saving dried flowers and herb seeds now, and already looking at the garden with an eye to next year. I’m planning a brash vulgar row of pots of tulips in flamboyant reds and golds and purples along the front fence, and concentrating all the cool white classical bulbs in one lavish pot by the front door. There will be a tone of clearing and weeding to be done and clearly some things have settled in rather too well and will have to be curbed.

It’s almost three years since we came here, and I confess my first strategy was mostly centred on how to get everything in. I’m beginning to feel I know the place a bit better now and some actual design work is possible. I’m starting with the magical border, the one with the Nine Herbs in it, which is dominated by mallow and elecampane, both of which are twice the size I expected them to be. They will have to be cut back and the mallow may well have to be moved altogether, though as it is currently about eight feet high, I dread to think how much work that will take. I’m planning to add mullein and some more marigolds, because it needs a bit more colour, but I’m looking for something red or purple for impact.

There is a lot of focussing on design going on in other parts of my life now too. As people who have met me in real life may know, I came to a complete standstill earlier this year, following last year’s turbulence, and I have being doing a lot of rethinking and rediscovery. I got very discouraged about my writing, and indeed about almost everything, and most of this year has been about sorting myself out.

I’ve had a lot of help and support from many of my fellow poets, and The Midsummer Foxes has had an injection of enthusiasm and inspiration. The non-fiction book I have been planning actually has a structure now and I have hauled myself out of the habit of rampaging in all directions and trying to get everything in (bit of a theme developing here, no?). I’ve learned to acknowledge the amount of time I put into my caring responsibilities, and the impact this has on what I’m able to do, and also the amount of experience I’ve built up in other fields, which gives me strengths I didn’t know I had.

So following all that, I am planning a new website, which means, after about twenty years, leaving the Burnedthumb domain behind. It will launch sometime between the equinox and hallowe’en, and its function will be slightly different from this one. There will be fewer blogposts, mostly containing updates, and the sort of content I’ve been putting here will be in the newsletters – seasonal reflections, short reviews, bits of herbal knowledge I’ve come across and so on. I want to write more longer form pieces for publication elsewhere, which I will link to as they arise.

So please sign up for the newsletter (link on the Contact page) if you like this sort of thing. I’m using Buttondown because it won’t harvest your data, and it’s easy to unsubscribe, and letters go out around every six weeks or so. There will be more news about this as I go on, and a bit of a tweak in the shop, maybe a sale offer or two.

August 16, 2024
Lavender’s Blue

It is Midsummer Day and the cloud is thick and heavy, though it is quite warm, and there hasn’t been much rain. The burn is quiet and the muddy banks are drying out. The pollen count is very high, so I am not even thinking of going into the garden until the next shower. The roses are in full bloom now and the tutsan bush and the dyer’s greenweed make a bright flash of yellow among all the leafage of the front garden, where the lavender borders are just thinking of coming into flower.

This week’s harvest has been the quaint stems of quaking grass:

which will dry so they will last all the year round. I will add the heads of poppy and teasel, when they ripen – their pale neutrals will make an airy display on my window sill. The poppies are at their best, though they seem to flower erratically, never more than two or three at a time, and dropping their petals within twenty-four hours, so there is a constantly moving flash of fire against the green.

The weather has been so cold at nights until the last week that the cuttings I took have not yet rooted and the tomatoes are looking puny and miserable. The herbs are thriving, however – the vervain and wormwood I planted out have taken well, and chamomile, yarrow, honeysuckle and marigold are on the edge of flowering. And finally we have meadowsweet in flower in the dampest part of the front garden – I didn’t feel properly settled in this garden until the meadowsweet and lavender have made themselves at home, so this feels significant!

The cold seems to have been tough for the birds too. Although this year’s broods fledged about when I expected, they are still coming to the feeders in great numbers, which seems to show that there isn’t so much alternative food about. We have a great spotted woodpecker too, conspicuous among the drab juvenile starlings by its flashes of scarlet, but the magpies seem to have intimidated the robins and goldfinches.

On the solstice we went to Cathkin Brae to watch the sunset. It was a disappointingly cloudy night, and the midges were out in force, but there were two thrushes singing against each other from the tallest trees and the air was full of the scent of elderflower. Let’s hope for less cloud and more sun this summer!

June 24, 2024
The Hill of Stones in April

This is, I guess, what social media might call a ‘timeline cleanse’. There’s a lot to be anxious or angry about, but also a lot of people making an effort to do something about it all – people restoring landscapes, saving species, campaigning for refugees or the disabled, developing projects for people with mental health problems, working for peace or for better working conditions, trying to stop some of the unjust and downright irrational things going on. More power to them all, but also, a time of refreshment and reconnection. Here’s a few photos, and a bit of bird and flower chat.

This weekend temperatures have gone up, and it has stopped raining long enough for me to get out into the garden. I’ve done some serious tidying up, and moved the first seedlings to my propagation patch, to harden off, and the lemon verbena and scented-leaved geraniums to their summer positions. Everything seems to have bulked up almost overnight, and I can see that winter was (mostly) quite kind to us. Almost all the plants have come through, and are finding their feet in the new plantings. This patch is the nine herbs garden, as most of the plants from the nine herbs charm are here (even the nettles, I’m sorry to say). The fennel and thyme are not – the fennel needs more sun than it would get here, and the thyme is too well established in the culinary patch to move. For reasons of my own, I have temporarily assumed that atterlothe is vervain.

I’ve had my first harvests, violet leaves to dry for oil, and chives and fines herbes in the freezer. The chives are showing flower buds, so it won’t be long before I’ll be making chive flower vinegar and drying thyme, which is always ready earlier than I expect. There are now tomatoes in the greenhouse and blackcurrants and gooseberry and apple tree are blossoming, but the damson tree has barely had any flower at all, which is a major disappointment. We have persuaded our factor not to spray our fencelines with herbicide, in return for keeping them free of invasive weeds, and our neighbour Jude has benefited from a lot of dandelions for her tortoise as a result. Still got some, though, they seem invincible!

Outside the garden, the hill is beginning to get serious about blossoming trees. There’s plenty of corporate pink and white cherry, but we have a lot of blackthorn, cherry plum and bird cherry coming out too, and the Victorian craze for lime tree walks is going to deliver a lot of forage for bees in a week or two. All the outlines of trees are getting scribbled in with new green, and there will be hawthorn and elder before too long. Bluebells are in short supply here though, and we may have to make a trip to Inchmahome to see them later on.

We have fewer goldfinches this year, but there are bluetits, chaffinches, robins and wren nesting close to the house, and the sparrows are thriving. Magpies, which were here in great numbers only a few weeks ago, seem to have scattered, though there is an enormous ramshackle nest in the hazel tree on the back road. I’ve heard chiffchaffs, and the black-backed gulls are here in force, but no swallows yet.

I am beginning to realise how much there is to know about a new territory, and though I have now been here for two and a half years, I’m barely scratching the surface. Because I’d been in Stirling for ten years before I started writing about it, I forgot the slow accumulation of things you notice, patterns you begin to recognise, knowledge built through experiment and failure. It can’t be rushed. I can see the shape of the hopes I had for the garden beginning to emerge, but I feel that this garden is talking back to me, shaping its own destiny and mine along with it. It’s a very different experience – I’m less young and gallus, but though I have to go slower, I think I might notice more, think more carefully, and maybe write better.

April 23, 2024
After the Storms

We have had two named storms in three days, which is something new. Now things are quieter, but still very wet and the burn behind the house, which is normally nothing more than a deep damp ditch, is running noisily down the hill to join the Lightburn and into the Clyde. I went out to see if the greenhouse and all my pot plants were intact, which they were, mostly, though I think I’ve lost a cowslip seedling. The quarter tray it was in was spun round and upended, and the contents are probably halfway across the garden.

But the new warmer temperatures have spurred the garden into growth. Everywhere I look there are daffodil, snowdrops, tulip shoots and iris springing up, even a lone and battered crocus underneath the roses.

The first witch hazel blssom is out and many of the perennials in the garden are putting up vigorous shoots. Of course, the place is a mess, as I try not to cut everything down too vigorously – if you leave the dead stems it provides hibernating spaces for ladybirds and other useful creatures, but I must admit, I’m longing for a dry day to get out and create a little order and room for the new plants. I have bought many of my seeds now, mullein and agrimony, soapwort, wormwood and mugwort. I’ve tried several times to save seeds from the wild plants down along the Clyde Walkway, but without success, so I bought some from Earthsong Seeds, whose seeds worked pretty well for me last year.

I have some more ordinary seeds too, thanks to my grandson who say he wants to grow rainbow carrots and lettuce and some gigantic yellow sunflowers with me, and I’m going back to my favourite Harbinger tomatoes. I tried Ruthje from Vital Seeds last year, but I wasn’t impressed, though I think the (relatively) cold summer, and the late start might have had a lot to do with it. And now my fingers are itching to get started.

The birds are getting restless too. Before the cold snap there was a definite increase in birdsong, though it seems to have tailed off a bit, and the pigeons are playing kiss chase in the cedar tree two gardens down. There was a robin staking its claim to one of the hawthorn trees along the burn, and the magpies are playing King of the Castle along the rooftops. It’s been a long dreary January, but finally, we are inching towards spring.

January 25, 2024
I Have Brought You to the Ring

I think that’s the end of summer. The children are going back to school on Wednesday, andour youngest grandchild will be among them, which will be the end of an era. The swifts have gone, and the starlings are beginning to show winter plumage, and the pinks of willowherb and thistle have been replaced by the first red berries on rowan and hawthorn. We have had the potatoes and the first courgette, and there are beans lengthening on the poles. There are still bees on the borage and butterflies on the buddleia, but there are spiders in the house and there was condensation on the windows for the first time this morning. The year is turning, and I am back at my desk, getting back to work.

We went to Edinburgh for the start of the Festival to see the Grit Orchestra, and it has developed a few more thoughts on culture and tradition first inspired by a short on-line course I took dealing with the archive at Tobar an Dualchais, which I want to develop over the next few posts. There is a crossover with the thinking I was doing on healing and recovery earlier this year, and the work I am still trying to do on the Nine Herbs Charm, via the concept of ‘Lǣc’. I wrote about it a while back

‘Lǣc’ is the important stuff you do when you aren’t ‘working’ – what my Church used to call ‘servile’ work’ – all the life admin, busywork, earning a living, mundane day to day stuff. ‘Lǣc’ is ‘recreation’ spelled re-creation as the self-help books do, holiday spelled ‘holy day’ as they used to do in the Middle Ages, the difference between ‘relieving symptoms’ and ‘healing’.

It’s a bit more than healing, though. It’s a communal activity, with a link to the sacred. It is demanding, and needs ‘duende’ – when I first read about it I thought of the Zen art of archery, or the tea ceremony, and the ‘lek’ where grouse and capercaillie meet in forest clearings to strut their stuff. And this brought me to the Eightsome Reel and the William Wallace quotation in the title, from before his country-defining victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. It occurs to me that this art, this culture, is serious stuff:

To sing here you will need

to open the heart,

the lungs and voice,

and meet it square.

You can’t sing from hiding,

nor drunk or afraid.

You can’t sing this softly

like chocolate in the sun.

You must give yourself

to the fight with all your strength.

It will take all you’ve got.

It will feel like death.’
The Outcry from The Wren in the Ash Tree, in Haggards

Now that summer is over, I am here, at the ring. Now to see if I can dance!

August 14, 2023
The Hopeful Post

This photo was taken in early June, and things have moved on a little since then. There are blue-grey phacelia flowers there now too, and blood-red poppies, but the foxglove has gone over. The high water mark of wild roses and elder flowers is just past its peak, but there are marigolds, borage, St Johns wort and sweet peas, and I’ve harvested two or three strawberries most days, and the first new potatoes. The nestlings have all fledged, and the rooflines are cluttered with baby starlings all startled at how much world there is, and the ferocity of seagulls. Best of all, there are swifts this year and housemartins, who are venturing closer now that there is less building going on in the estate.

School holidays begin this week and there are lots of children here so it will be much noisier. Many people are in houses with gardens for the first time, so there are lots of barbecues. We have a few gardens that are all astroturf and trampolines, and the Facebook group has several posts from people freaked out by caterpillars and magpies rooting through the planters, but also some neighbours who are into food forests, and wild flower meadows. There’s a sea of ox eye daisies and red campion at the end of the road, which I’m sure was deliberately planted. I hope that we show a large tolerance of the children wandering about, making dens among the bushes, exploring the burn and getting to know the wild fringes of what could be a very narrow and conventional suburb. There are many sociable and imaginative people here – it could be wonderful.

We could do with a bit of wonderful in this house, and we might get it. My husband has been in hospital since the last post (hence the silence) and it’s all been a bit fraught. But finally there is progress and we are hoping to have him home in time for his birthday this weekend. Writing and editing has been on hold all this time, but maybe soon……….

June 26, 2023
Light and Airy

If you’re used to seeing flowers growing in lawns where they are cut down to size every time the mower comes out, seeing them growing in open ground is quite a revelation. We have buttercups waving their yellow heads on knee-high stems along the footpath, self heal more than 20 centimetres tall, and these speedwells, which I thought were short stemmed, creeping at ground cover level, coming up light and airy, and creating a sea of blue in some places that I almost mistook for bluebells. This gives a feeling of lightness and movement to the understorey of the trees, and adds to the sense of exuberance I’m getting this spring. We are in peak hawthorn time now, with elder and rowan just beginning, and the place looks like Fat Sam’s at the end of Bugsy Malone, sprayed with foam everywhere.

I wrote about the blossom last time, because it was the first thing that impressed me about the new territory, but this year I have been struck by the number of lime trees. They are everywhere, sheltering the Kirk, lining avenues in the park, ornamentals on the mowed verges, but in the older parts of the Lang Toon, they were used to demarcate the boundaries of front gardens, and many of them are still there. Some of them have been allowed to grow

some are cut back to the bare minimum

but this one gives you the idea of the look the original planners must have been going for in the days when a pleached lime avenue was the must-have for the professional owners of the new suburban villas.

In a small diversion that isn’t as devious as it first appeared, I’ve been reading this essay from my friend and fellow geopoetician, the ethnologist and activist Mairi McFadyen. https://www.mairimcfadyen.scot/fragile-correspondence/2023/essay dealing with the clearances and the consequences of the community buyout of Abriachan Forest. She talks about how the loss of language leads to the loss of local knowledge, the exploitation and degradation of the land, and in this case, the removal of the local people. It’s a wonderful essay, raising many of the issues and preoccupations that inform my poetry, and I can’t recommend it warmly enough.

But the point I’m working towards is that the Lang Toon doesn’t really have those problems. On the contrary, throughout its very long history, people have been brought here to serve whatever needs the ruling classes felt were important at the time, and abandoned. These houses were built for the managers of the mines, all gone, and later of the electrical industry, all gone, and now we are mostly a commuter town with people living here and working in Glasgow or East Kilbride. This too has consequences for land use, local knowledge, and community building, and though I feel there are grounds for optimism, I realise there are a lot assumptions I’m going to have to unpick as I go into the next poems, the next book.

This may be a slower process than I like. One of the long-standing medical conditions that plague this family has struck again, and we have someone in hospital. He’s getting good care, but not being able to drive makes things very complicated! There may be very little activity on this account for the next few weeks.

May 26, 2023
The Second Year in the Garden

This year’s gardening has started in earnest, now that the frost is over, and the borders are beginning to fill up. The early morning is full of birdsong from the trees in the valley, and a lot of very excited rooks, jackdaws and magpies from the gully behind the house. The burn is flowing strongly and the early shrubs – wild roses, honeysuckle and hawthorn – are showing their first leaves. In our garden I can see the beginnings of bud burst on the damson and apple trees, and I am cautiously optimistic that we will have blossom, although this is only their second spring here.

There is good progress on the greenhouse, and I am hopeful it will be finished soon, as there are a lot of seeds waiting to move in!

I have even started some opportunistic early potatoes in bags beside the shed – my favourite Pentland Javelin. After Sunday, when frost is forecast, the hardy annual herbs – chervil, parsley, dill – will go into the garden, as well as annual flowers for cutting. And then the real adventure will start, as I sow new perennial herbs. My aim is to get the overall structure of the garden in place this year, and try to attract as many pollinators and butterflies as I can, but I know I am already distracted by the thoughts of vegetables I can sneak into the gaps.

In the house there is the same sense of burgeoning chaos. Editing slipped a bit during StAnza, but I’m almost finished one book, and getting started on three more. There will be a LIVE launch for The Well of the Moon – among many others which came out in lockdown, at a Red Squirrel Press showcase in April – watch out for more about this next week – and the Ceasing Never website went live. There are three articles up now, and it has attracted a lot of interest, and some very favourable comments. The collective includes eleven exciting poets, so there should be a lot to read and think about over the next few months.

And also there is a new booklet in the works from Roncadora Press

The poem is a tiny sequence of Charms for the Healing of Grief, which I wrote about in the Group Hug post. There are seven charms, five herbs and two birds – all iconic Scottish species. Hugh Bryden illustrated it, and made the beautiful breaclet – which you can wear, if you dare. Because it would be so expensive to buy, (but get a look at it, if you get the chance – the construction and the little zoom-in pictures are FABULOUS!) he has also created a limited edition of the booklet, and there will be more about this when it is ready.

I’m still reading a lot – I sold eight books at StAnza, and bought eleven, learning Irish and planning a big review of Jim Carruth’s amazing Auchensale Trilogy as well as my own stuff. No wonder I feel breathless! But there are moments of loveliness – this is my spring garden, finally doing its thing.

March 22, 2023
The Rune for Harvest

This is the s- rune, which is never a good one to pick. In The Wren in the Ash Tree, which formed the last section of Haggards, there are lines about runes:

And the völva is casting the runes.
The leather bag is thick,
tough and unbending,
and gives away no secrets,
but the stones mutter
and grind against each other.
The black angular lines –
tree, hammer, wealth,
ocean, ice – will come together,
fall in the right configuration,
give their bleak verdict soon enough.

The rune for harvest is the same
as the rune for the day of reckoning.

Even the right way up the S is ominous, and if it is reversed, it foretells the apocalypse. That bit of The Wren is pretty apocalyptic, though it does move to a more positive mood later on (and the wrens are quite cute!), but the S-rune feels appropriate for the time we are in, not altogether doom-laden, but preparing for winter, warm clothes, jam and pickles and facing the realisation that what you have done is what you’ve got.

Now work in the garden is coming to an end, the trees are losing their leaves in a blaze of magnificence, and before we start thinking about next year, next time, I’m making my reckoning. A few weeks ago we reached a whole year in this house, and we are no longer the newest on the estate. I’ve seen the seasons change, discovered the potential of the garden, worked out how we are going to use the rooms, begun to understand the weather and the seasonal changes. The house and garden have revealed their personalities, and roots are being set. There are poems at last. We have more herbs and less grass, more bookshelves and fewer cardboard boxes – we gave thirty boxes to one of our newer neighbours when they were moving in.

We have weathered several changes in our family awareness as we navigate the ways to live with neurodiversity, and the need for more support. Some things will never be as easy as we hoped, but there is more kindness and help than we imagined. We have learned new ways to be involved in our community and different responsibilities. You have to deal with many more guisers at Hallowe’en here!

Hallowe’en is a good time for this kind of evaluation. My pagan and witch friends are celebrating samhain and their ancestors, my folklore friends thinking about ghosts and hauntings and my own tradition makes this a time to remember our dead – the famous ones in Heaven and the dearer ones we hope are there, but who are still with us through the communion of saints. And I know everyone is trying to finish up the last jobs, the last maintenance so everything is ready for Christmas.

Harvests are not all feasting and celebration, especially this year when there seems to be so much more cause for anxiety, but when the harvest is in, there is time for rest and recovery, for remembering and coming together, creating space for something new.

October 26, 2022
High Summer on the Hill of Stones

When I was seven, just before leaving infant school, we were suddenly allowed to play on the field behind the playground, which had been out of bounds for years. The land had been sold for housing and the grass had grown wild easily to chest height for small children. For days we lost ourselves in the grass, exploring, hiding, and laying ambushes for each other, and it was one of the happiest and most unusual memories of that time. The bit of haggard land behind our house in the picture above has been similarly neglected this year, and the grass is lush and seeding. And last Friday, five small boys spent hours there, playing hide and seek and jumping out on each other, just as we did. It was brilliant. Two nights ago, there was a fox barking there, at another fox up in the fields up the hill. It is strange to be able to see and hear things like this when our estate is so relentlessly, predictably suburban, but this bit of Glasgow is like that.

It has been – and still is – a very flowery summer. Vetches, honeysuckle, meadowsweet, fireweed, enchanters’ nightshade and all the umbellifers of the roadside have given us their best. Now there are rowan berries, apples forming on the wild tree along the footpath and the first blackberries are ripe. The garden is quieter, but the robins are practising for their winter territory grab, and the goldfinches are investigating the hawthorn trees behind the house. This year’s gulls are trying out their voices – as raw and wobbly as teenaged boys, and the swallows and house martins are stretching their wings before they leave.

The garden has dried out a lot – I’ve even had to water the lavender – but the betony has found a bit of shade, and I suspect, an underground watercourse

The borage and marigolds have enjoyed the sun

but I’ve had to move the mints into the shade – they were beginning to look quite shell-shocked. The rain forecast for Monday will be more than welcome!

Already I am thinking about bulbs for next year, and some annuals to sow in the autumn for an early start. The first compost bin has been emptied to mulch the roses. When the children go back to school next week, a new cycle will begin, with three books to edit, some new poems, a new writing project to work on, and a poetry discussion group to plan. With a lot of family changes to navigate, and all the political and economic turbulence to come, it feels good to have a place of stability to work from.

August 11, 2022

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