BurnedThumb

Winter is over and summer is come
and the sound of the lawn-mower is heard in the land.

I caught a glimpse of a blackbird hen trying to get about three feet of grass stem into the hedge this week. I am fairly certain there is a dunnock nesting there, as well as a colony of sparrows, and a robin is using the birch and the rowan as song-posts, so the nesting season is under way.

Plants in the woodland garden are bulking up nicely, and the first honesty is in bloom. Flowers are a big deal just now, as the bumblebees have been emerging from hibernation. The crucuses were all early, but the daffodils are late, or coming up blind, so I will have to think of some more early flowers to increase the pollen supplies.

The garden has been quite noisy, as, along with the birds and the bees, the frogs have been at it too. There’s quite a lot of frogspawn this year, so I hope there will be no sharp frosts.

The last two days have been grey, fairly cool, and misty. As we came home from our daughter last night the mist was condensing on the tree branches and dripping like rain. Shrubs like honeysuckle, tutsan and fruit bushes are in their first leaf, and the early trees are just at bud burst.

I have borrowed a camera from my daughterjust in time to show you how the garden is behaving. The herbs are always quickest to start – someone said they have the souls of weeds, which give them incredible vigour and hardiness (translated, means they get out of hand very easily!), and the thyme which you can see here is bulking up nicely.

In the woodland garden – i.e., under the birch tree – the primroses are out, the violets are throwing up a lot of freshh green leaf, but no flowers as yet, ferns and aquilegias are coming through well, there are two erythroniums coming up this year, and the hellebores and pulmonarias look fabulous.

This is the little waterfall at Fingask. It’s one of the last pictures I took before my camera gave up the will to live, and my interim solution, which is to take photos on my phone, doesn’t impress me much. So the waterfall is to take the bare look off the post, rather than to illustrate it.

Not that the sort of photos I’m able to take can do today justice. I’ve had a phenomenal day. It started when I was hanging washing on the line, and about twenty curlews flew over the garden, obviously heading up-river to the nice boggy country round Flanders Moss. Just hearing them warm up their beautiful calls put me in the spring-time mood. There were oyster-catchers later on too. They’ll stick around. The river banks and Airthrey Loch just up the road are ideal for them to nest in, and we’ll hear their teenage-style all-night partying for several months.

So I’ve been gardening. Not just the kind of out-door housework kind of thing you do while you’re still thinking about it, but real live planting, dividing congested clumps of snowdrops and crocuses, and planting out some michaelmas daisies to extend the pollen season for bees and hoverflies.I have potatoes chitting in the greenhouse, and sweetpeas and asters in trays. I’ve sowed seeds too, tomatoes, chillies and geraniums, and this year’s big experiment, melons. I chose a variety called Emir, because it tolerates low temperatures. This is partly to give the greenhouse soil a rest from tomatoes – those I grow this year will be in big pots, not soil – and partly because I wasnt to see if I can. They’ve just begun to germinate, and I’m very excited about them.

the garden is really beginning to green up. The snowdrops are just about over, but the primroses are closer to blooming every time I look at them, and the alkanet and pulmonaria are coming through, and there is blossom on the japonica, and catkins on the birch, hazel and sallows. No bees yet, and no frogspawn, though there are frogs getting bolder and more active by the day.

And in the house there are so many poems beginning to wriggle and hatch. I’ve been putting all the scraps and notes and stray lines and images together, and it looks like there has been a hotbed of ideas in the back of my mind where The Territory of Rain sequence has been germinating for a year or two. Now to prick them out in a proper notebook, and see what the crop is like!

When I went out yesterday morning there was nothing in this planter but a few struggling buds. When I came back yesterday afternoon it looked like this

Spring is sprung alright. There are frogs active in the pond (no spawn yet), oyster-catchers on the river bank, and I saw six curlews flying over the fields. I think they’re probably heading towards Flanders Moss, but it was lovely to see them.

In the garden birds are claiming nest sites, and there has been some interest in the nest box on the birch. I am not quite as optimistic as I was about the possibility of wrens, because there is a grey squirrel, all spruced up and gleaming, far too familiar with this bit of the village. We’ll see, however. There is a tangle of wild rose growing up all around it, which may deter him. There is one single aconite in the spring garden

and the witch hazel is in full bloom, and giving off that wierd but not unpleasant smell, like a mixture of coconut and turps. The new starwberry plants look as if they are settling in, and the chives are up. What more could you ask of February?

Fifty years ago when my friends Mary and Charles moved into the village, there were bitterns in the reeds below the bridge, and the river was well-known for the wintering ducks that could be seen here. Even when we moved here, twenty years later, you could see flocks of lapwings over the fields in spring-time, and fieldfares and redwings every time you looked out.

The changes haven’t been all bad. We see more goldfinches and yellowhammers than we used to, and buzzards and kestrels are common. There’s even a sparrowhawk, I don’t think the owls have left yet, and there are swallows and housemartins on both sides of the river. But the redwings and fieldfares are an occasional sighting now, curlews are very rare, and the duck populations on the river have dwindled enormously. There are still lapwings and skylarks, but you have to look much more carefully for them, and I haven’t seen a hare for more than five years.

The bird that Mary loved most of all was the song thrush. She used to sit out in the garden listening to thrushes singing in the evenings, and she missed it very much when she became too deaf to hear it. But she wouldn’t have heard thrush-song very often anyway. I have always thought that if you have a lot of blackbirds you won’t have many thrushes because they are in direct competition with each other, and we certainly have a lot of blackbirds. They must be winter migrants, but there are at least eight of them in and around our garden now, bullying the sparrows off the feeders and squabbling amongst themeslves, and even in the nesting season there must be at least two pairs here. I’d pretty much given up hope of hearing a song thrush in full territorial voice.

Until this morning. As I came across the bridge from the supermarket I could hear it from at least fifty yards away, singing and singing in that umistakeable fine careless rapture kind of a way, perched at the top of a sapling ash (not the one in the picture unfortunately, that one’s further up the river), staking his claim to the garden, the riverbank, the park and the whole village. Mary would have been so pleased.

The first snowdrops are out!

Although it feels quite chilly and there is frost forecast for later in the week, I was much encouraged by what’s going on in the garden. There were three blackbirds bathing in the pond this morning, sparrows and bluetits and great tits all busy at the feeders, and warming up their territory-marking songs, and signs of life everywhere. The first buds on the hazel hedge are beginning to break – always the first in this garden –

bulbs are beginning to show, and the very first flowers are already out!

On the poetry front, too there are new beginnings. I was at the first evnt at the SCottish Writers Centre in Glasgow last week, where, in a relaxed but inspiring talk Ron Butlin said several things about the process of compostion which started my own processes. The first was something that resonated with me, as it’s something I think about a lot:
that poetry is something that happens behind the words.

Perhaps it’s obvious to everyone – but if that’s the case why is there so much shapeless boneless poetry about? Poetry, it seems to me, is as much about shape and flow and pattern as it is about language. Without this you just get a search for ever more quirky or bizarre images and themes, a list of banned images (rememeber the seagulls/shards debate that rampaged last year?) and a poetry that becomes ever more cerebral and remote.

The other was something less comfortable – in summary, that it isn’t possible to write about a subject that you know too well, because you have nowhere to go with it, and nothing to gain from the writing process. It’s made me question a lot of assumptions about what I want to write; it’s not that I think I’m writing the same poems over and over, or the same subjects, but that I’m trying to write about subjects I’ve already over-thought. Poetry might work better if it wasn’t so much a record of where I’ve been, as the first phase of exploring where I’m going. Feels kind of weird – a new way to balance thought and feeling, but interesting, interesting—

Also, I’m delighted and honoured to be able to say that I’ve a poem in the new issue (issue 3) of the elegant and thoughhtful on-line magazine Poetandgeek

Last year was a real roller-coaster. Of course it had its glorious moments – the chief of which in my life was the launch of Wherever We Live Now but for an awful ot of people there was a sense of loss and closure and dismay. Some careers ended, som relationships went through the mill, some people had to accept the realities of living with illness and old age, and whatever illusions we’d been nurturing about a quick end to recession and return to normal, or about the Arab Spring were firmly squashed.
But out of all this seems to have come a certain sense of clarity and a new start. We may not be where we thought we were, but our feet are on solid ground now, and we can make a new start. So this is what I’ve been doing, taking advantage of a bright morning to go for a first territory walk, and establish exactly what trees there are along the river road.

The youngest trees are these oak seedlings, planted by the farmer three years ago. The guards are to keep the rabbits off the vulnerable shoots, and so far it seems to be working.

These are young alders, growing right on the river bank. The river is tidal and shallow here, so they often have their feet in water, which they like, so they should do well.

There are many sallows on the other bank, but this is the only one along this stretch on our side. If you’ve followed the blog for a while, you’ll have seen photos of the larger green willows that are more typical.

And this is the most common tree on this bank, a big ash, covered in ivy.

There are also hawthorns, brambles elders wild roses and honeysuckle, and round the factory there are sycamores, rowans, cypreeses and larches, most of which were planted as screens or ornamental plantings. I’m planning to do this walk regularly, focussing this year on the birds and flowering plants I see, and to try and understand more about this square mile I live in.