BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Walking the territory

The Hill of Stones

These are stones I lifted from the front garden when I dug up the lawn. It isn’t all of them either – I’d only done half of it when I took this photo. They mark a shift in my understanding of this new territory as we go through the seasons. The ‘place of the fire’ is really down the hill in the long town, where the miners lived, and it does shape the landscape and the mindset there. But, although some fire poems are still coming, I’m feeling my new roots are being influenced by something else. We are up the hill, a mile away, on land that has always been farmed and grazed, and the territory where I live and garden is shaped by the layers of stone underneath the very wet earth. It is hilly and sometimes steep – our front garden slopes away to both sides and the front path is like a drawbridge let down onto the road in front. My hands are battered and my nails are broken by weeding amongst the bands of sticky clay, often with rocks embedded in them, that make up the garden.

But the soil is full of invertebrates – plenty of worms, beetles, spiders and other grubs, and it is growing a lot of things I hoped for, as well as a few things I did not expect. I thought, having less space available to me, I wouldn’t bring some plants I thought might be invasive, especially as I think they might be growing wild locally. The plants had other ideas. Alchemilla, foxglove, meadowsweet and welsh poppy have hitch-hiked on the plant pots I brought with me, sweet cicely and chickweed crept in from the wild, and really, I am so glad to see them!

This garden knows what it wants, and it wants things I did not plan for.

The wider territory is making its personality plain too. The big difference here is the trees – all those folds and inclines are lined with trees, and verges are planted up lavishly, not only with the predictable flowering cherry or oak, but bird cherry, whitebeam, lime, hazel and beech. Gardens are full of lilacs, magnolias and laburnum, and I found not only wild planted apple trees, but a community orchard in the park. There are fewer ash trees and almost no alders, but what we do have in quantity is beech, which I love. Some of my earliest tree memories are of beech – an autumn tree silhouetted against a blue sky as I came home from church, watching leaves spin gently to the ground outside my English classroom one misty November day – but here I am getting to know them very closely.

I had never seen beech flowers before, mostly because they appeared on branches way above my head, but here I walk among them.

The understorey of beech trees, and the plant habitats here are different from what I’m used to. We have had fewer bluebells and no primroses except in my garden, but more violets, cowslips, ferns and herb robert, fewer wild roses, much more honeysuckle. And I have just seen the weird spikes of wild arum unfolding – the first time I have come across it in Scotland.

The newness of all this has made me slow down all the plans and projects I might have had. I’m letting my herbs settle in to their new space before I harvest any, and listening more to what my new territory is telling me about how to go forward.

May 21, 2022
Lights, Camera, Action

On Sunday, I saw my first of these ladys smocks (also known as cuckoo flowers) growing in the forecourt of the police station. They are much earlier here in the west, than I was expecting, but it seems to me that the celandines, which have appeared en masse this week, are rather later. Along the footpath and in the park, the green things, which seemed to have stopped and started during March, have suddenly stirred into action. Ferns are unfolding, sheets of acid green petty spurge (also known as milkweed), dogs mercury – which indicates ancient woodland – and bluebell leaves are showing in the wilder bits of the park, and shepherd’s purse, ground ivy and whitlow grass are along the pavements. I never expected so much plantlife in this built up suburb, but it seems even more abundant here than back in Stirling.

The birds are busier too. We have several goldfinches, siskins, blue tits and chaffinches as regular visitors to the bird feeder. Though the sparrows seem to have dispersed a little, the blackbirds are back and the starlings are still here in their bronzed summer feathers. The common gulls have been joined by lesser black-backed gulls, and I can hear woodpeckers drumming in the trees along the footpath whenever I go out into the garden. All the smaller trees are wearing more green – hawthorn, birch, bramble, poplar and hazel, and the pink cherry trees the builders scattered around the estate have fat buds just ready to open.

In the garden, I have seeds germinating in the cold frame, leaves on the dwarf willow and new shoots of lily of the valley and martagon lilies. The culinary herbs are settling into their new patch, and the first flowers have appeared on the rosemary. The beds at the back are looking a little bare, as I’m moving some plants to the front, and the new herbs to replace them won’t be ready for a while, but there are tulips I didn’t expect coming out all pink and scarlet, and plenty of purple blossom developing on the lilac.

Settling into this new space is like folk dancing – advance and retire, hands across the set, turn and progress. You think you discover something, you realise you got it wrong, then maybe, after all …. This garden does have more light and air than our previous garden, as I expected, and the soil is as heavy, but it isn’t acid, and barren. It is rich, and though full of stones, it’s also full of worms and grubs and ladybirds, and bumble bees have come out in hundreds now the weather is warm. In winter the back of the house was in shadow all morning and the sun rose straight into my study window, but now the first light shines into the windows to the right, and by ten the sun is so high over the roofs that most of the back, as well as all of the front, is in the light. The soil is not as wet as I had imagined on the south side – in fact it seems to have dried out a lot in the last coouple of weeks – but against the north and west fences, it’s still very wet. I think there may be an underground watercourse running down into the burn behind the house, and I’m planning to move all the wet-loving herbs – the marsh mallows, the flag irises and the meadowsweet there.

It seems appropriate too, that there are finally new poems to think about, and new kinds of writing to experiment with. I haven’t done many reviews lately, because I still have fourteen boxes of books waiting for shelves, but I am working on an essay about geopoetics as a commentary on a discussion project I am working on with Pentland poet Helen Boden, whose debut collection A Landscape to Figure In was published by Red Squirrel Press last October. Look out for this in my next newsletter, which I hope to send out next month sometime.

April 13, 2022
Seed Time

A landmark day – the first seeds sown for the new garden – ragged robin (for the very wet bits against the fence), bergamot, lavender and snapdragons for the bit in the front that gets full sun, elecampane for the bank above the burn and parsley and lettuce. In the kitchen herb patch I have also sown marigolds and chervil behind the chives.

It has been a lovely week, when the garden tipped into spring. I have seen the first bumble bee queens and the first peacock butterfly. The roses and fruit bushes are opening their new leaf buds, and the primroses and auriculas I have transplated have taken to the rich soils with alacrity. I heard the first chiffchaffs yesterday, and saw the first celandines on the banks along the footpath.

I have made a lot of progress clearing the rather tatty front lawn, though it looks rather worse than better so far. The turf is going to be used as mulch or compost, once it has dried out and I have shaken as much as possible of the topsoil back onto the bed. The good thing is it is full of very lively worms.

The bad thing is it is also full of stones, which makes digging very hard work indeed.

But it can be worth it to see this.

After what feels like a long gap, I am editing a big book – Colin Will’s new and selected poems, which covers thirty years of his enormous contribution to Scottish poetry. I am planning new writing myself, both poetry and non-fiction, but some of it will only happen when the new library is built and I can get fifteen boxes of books onto their proper shelves. This looks as if it will happen next month; we are choosing colours for the walls and planning the lighting this weekend. After that, the real work will begin!

March 25, 2022
Ploughing the Rocks of Bawn

Come all you loyal heroes wherever you may be
Don’t hire with any master till you know what your work may be
Don’t hire with any master from the clear daylight till the dawn
For he’ll want you rising early to plough the rocks of Bawn
The Rocks of Bawn – Irish traditional

By some oversight, I don’t have any photos of the front border from when we came. It was a tangle of potentilla (a pale pink, rather washed out and struggling), senecio bushes, wildly overgrown, and a sinister sprinkle of creeping buttercup and couch grass. This is what it looks like now!

It was a sair fecht! And I have had the words of that song (sung by Christy Moore), running through my head ever since. The senecio wasn’t that bad, though it had layered itself and overgrown itself and died back and resprouted, but I got it out, eventually. What made it such a pain was the soil, mostly sticky clay, but also some rather scratchy sand, and these:

These are what I dug out of the planting holes for the roses. I should have known – there is a geology report of the area which describes the ground as heavy silty clay with cobbles inclusions, over coal measures. I had to look that up too, but it means the sort of thing you find where coal might be present – siltstone, mudstone, and limestone, which explains why the soil, although wet, isn’t as acid as I thought it might be. But I had no idea how many stones there were, nor how hard it would be to get them up. But there are now three roses, Maidens Blush, a delicate pink alba rose, Buff Beauty, a creamy-yellow musk rose developed in the early twentieth century, and Tuscany Superb, a variant of the Apthecary rose (gallica officinalis) I’ve grown for years. It’s a deep crimson, and richly scented – as in fact they all are. There’s no point in a rose without a scent!

The other excitement was discovering that there are airvents in the wall, which were covered up by soil on one side, and lawn on the other.

The garden slopes down towards the south, and clearing those vents is going to involve creating steps down, so that soil doesn’t just wash downhill. My conversations with this garden are becoming steadily more feisty!

I’m still getting used to the east-west orientation. The light is never where I expect it to be, and the wind, which is still mostly south-west, pats and plays with the house, like a cat with a ball, or hurls rain against the kitchen windows, living the sittingroom peaceful. We can’t hear the slates rattling here, partly because they are heavy concrete ones, mostly because we’re not directly under the roof. In the old house it was easy to imagine trolls riding the roof until it broke, as they used to in Icelandic sagas, but the draught whistles through the windows. All of which means that my planting designs are being revised again and again, as I find cosier corners for things that like sun or shelter, more open ones for plants that are hardy, or want shade. It’s as disorientating as learning a new language, but as fascinating.

January 28, 2022
Thaw

The Thaw

Just two degrees of difference.

The air softens and dulls, grass blurs.

The privet heights are quick with sparrow-bustle,

blackbird hop, wren flit, a new colony

born in craic and kerfuffle.

A great tit trapezes birch-stems

nibbling the catkin sheaths,

the see-saw strop of teacher, teacher,

sharpens the morning, adding fizz

to spring’s still coolness.

Ebb-tide is swimming with ducks,

upended, spinning, suddenly noisy.

Paired swans, humped leavings of snow,

melt into the drained river.

The slick banks slump into silty furrows.

Damp is gathering with the first drift of rain.

Earth relaxes ice-bound muscles,

lets out the sharp sour stink of thaw –

mud and leaf-mould, and frost-burned grass

collapsing into wetness, rot, fertility.

This is from Wherever We Live Now, when the ice had been thick on the banks of the Forth, and the sudden change was like the curtains swishing back at the theatre. Here, in the place of the fire, it is not so dramatic. There was a wee sprinkle of snow and a bit of frost, and there was a good six degrees of difference, but everywhere looked quiet, and gray and a little bit cooler than you might expect, and it still does. But the birds have had their cue. The robins have been busy all winter, but the great tits have joined in with their ‘teacher, teacher’ and on the path into town the blackbirds are marking their territories, and all the rooks crows, jackdaws and magpies are sorting themselves out, and clucking over the state of last year’s nests. These birds are shamelessly at it already, having only packed it in reluctantly in November.

What with bad knees and poetry and trying to get the house sorted out, I did not do as much in the garden as I had imagined, but now I’m glad, because there are several places where bulbs are coming up, and goodness knows what damage I might have done if I’d breezed in, clearly and improving and hacking things to bits. But we finally brought home all the plants which had been holidaying at my son’s house.

There will have to be considerable reconfiguring of the current beds to accommodate all of them, but it can be done bit by bit. And there are some new and exciting seeds that I saved for when we settled. Looks like my knee healed just in time.

On the poetry front, I’ve been involved in judging the William Bonar competition, doing final proofs for a collection by Ruby McCann, and selecting poems by Red Squirrel Press poets for Herbology News. And I even wrote a poem. There is more of a thaw going on than I realised!

January 14, 2022
The New Path

Our nearest road was closed for a couple of months while the council put in this new path for walkers and cyclists. It’s rather lovely. I took the camera there yesterday. I found the rowans!

This path is heavy on beech and sycamore, which gives a lot of golden leaves this time of year, and plenty of beech mast for the grey squirrels, but I found oak, holly, ivy and hazel too, and ash trees, some of which looked ominously bare. It may have been because we had an unusually dry summer, but I can’t help wondering about die-back. There are ash trees in full leaf, however, so it may not be as serious as I might have thought.

I liked these ferns, but I can’t identify them reliably.

The most surprising thing was this wild apple tree. Down south there are many rogue apple trees on the edges of roads and paths, perhaps sprung from cores discarded at picnics, but I didn’t know of any in Scotland.

I think I heard a blackbird singing, which came as a relief, as I haven’t seen any blackbirds or thrushes here. I thought I’d finally seen one here

But no, it was a starling. In fact as I focussed on this picture, I saw that the whole tree was alive with starlings, sparrows (both tree sparrows and house sparrows) and coal tits, some of them only noticeable when they moved. I think birds here are quite cautious, because so many houses have cats which wander around the whole estate, but there seem to be plenty of them. I’m looking forward to getting to know them better through the winter.

November 5, 2021
Making Connections

We are beginning to feel a little less transitory now. A lot of boxes have been unpacked (though there are many more to go) and we have had a chance to think about what we own and how we use it, so our living spaces are becoming more welcoming, and our working spaces more organised and accessible. This is my herb and craft cupboard, which holds a lot of random stuff – materials and equipment, including my camera, which now has its own proper place – that used to be scattered across a lot of nooks and crannies, so that every job was harder to get started, to organise or to clear away afterwards. There is a big bookcase in this room too, so all my reference books and files will be where I need them.

There are small forays outside now, too. A month before we moved I had a nasty flare-up of my rheumatoid arthritis, and for a long time walking was very difficult. But if RA is sneaky and excruciatingly disabling, it is also variable, which means that it can abate as fast as it came. This week has been suddenly a lot better, and we have been walking up the field track, meeting cows, still outside, and some horses – and also a raven, which we didn’t expect – and into the town a couple of times, which has meant the opportunity to see a whole new range of plants growing on what looks like a subsoil of heavy clay. There are even bulrushes in some of the open spaces between the streets, which implies some very wet ground beneath.

I am enjoying the feeling of looking out from this high point. It’s not that high as Scotland goes, but we do have an open aspect over miles of counntry. A lot of it is the glittering urban sprawl of Glasgow – a high rise or two, a lot of pylons and a couple of television masts, but there are belts of woodland, open green country and some very distant hills. After being right at the bottom of the Forth Valley, this feels exhilarating and welcoming.

We are getting to know our neighbours, and their animals – almost every house has a dog or a cat, and next door has rabbits, too. The birds I thought were quite scarce seem to be here too, but shy. We put up a feeder, and they came – blue tits, wrens, robin, starlings and sparrows. Clearly, I just have to make an effort to stop and look, be quiet and let them show themselves when they are ready. But sometimes, you get something really unexpected – last night, I looked out of my window and saw a fox crossing the street. It is clear that there are going to be many different kinds of connections to be made to this territory.

October 19, 2021
Home Is Where the Heart is

The thing I notice most of all as I view potential new homes, is that they are all spaces for love. It can take many different forms. Some houses have photos of the children everywhere, and bedrooms tailored to their tastes and interests – wall decorations, teepees for reading, film posters and bedding emblazoned with their favourite TV characters. Some have been enhanced by DIY – customised storage, fancy lighting, a beautiful and complicated decor – some of which has been cherished well beyond its normal expiry date. Sometimes it’s the garden which has been looked after while the house gently decays. Sometimes the rooms reflect the owner’s passions – a well-used cooker, musical instruments, rows of DVDs. I’m sorry to say that very few houses contain many books!

The ones that move me are the ones where someone obviously died. The decoration hasn’t been maintained, the furniture is old and battered, but children have put in new central heating, or an adapted bathroom, or simplified a garden so that a parent can be comfortable, and stay in their own home until the end.

Sometimes the structure of a house has been neglected, or a garden has gone to seed (or worse, been put under astroturf or gravel), but there’s always evidence that something has been cherished. Someone’s heart has been in this home. walk into it, treading softly. It feels quite privileged to be able to think about taking it over.

I was going to think some more about ‘those who disappeared’, in this post because there are a lot of ambiguities in that phrase that I need to explore, as I think of starting in somewhere new, and I thought I would follow up with a review of David Morley’s Fury, which has a very pertinent take on the subject, but I was caught off balance by the process of house viewing (and selling). I thought I’d strike a warmer note while I can. So here is an indication of some of the loved things in my house:

From the Garden

A tomato should be warm,
the skin loose as on a granny’s hands,
fine as satin, but electric bright
with hoarded sun, a blaze.
The scent of that twiggy stalk
will cling to your hands all day

Your knife must be sharp.
When the edge is only a little blunt
the silky skin puckers and the cut
is ragged, the flesh bruised,
and all the sweet fluid lost.
You pierce the skin, and slice.

Red circles fall under your hands.
Seeds cling to the core, suspended
in a jelly carapace, a swim of juice.
Salt grains, fragments of crushed
black pepper, sweet balsamic sting
of dressing – summer on a plate.

July 21, 2021
The Well Has Landed

The Well of the Moon had its first outing last Thursday, courtesy of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, and in very distinguished company. Ellen McAteer and William Bonar (whose books I had the privilege of editing) launched their books (you can get them both from Red Squirrel Press) and Vahni Capildeo headlined, and was awesome.

I’ve added the book to the shop, and so far 27 copies have made their way to people all over the country, so I hope they are enjoying the poetry. Red Squirrel Press is arranging a formal launch in the next fortnight – I will add a post to confirm the date.

I have put my editing hat back on now, and there are no less than three books on the go, two full collections and a pamphlet, and there is the prospect of an anthology later on too. Plus we are still in the process of moving house. We have been held up by repairs to this house, but the last ones have been booked in. Meanwhile the housing market has taken off, and twice now a house we were interested in has sold before we had a chance to view it. The garden has taken something of a back seat, though benign neglect seems to suit it. The cold snap means that we have peak aquilegia at the same time as the first roses and sweet rocket as well as peonies. Birds don’t seem to have done so well as last year. Despite a lot of territory marking and mating behaviour, there have been very few fledglings – some blue tits and sparrows, one single starling and a robin.

Perhaps they are all late. The frogs were very late this year, fortunately missing the frost, and now we have a lot of tadpoles and newts. Usually blackbirds and magpies demolish loads of them, but they haven’t done so this year, and we could be in for something biblical when they leave the pond! The swallows and house martins were very late arriving too, but they are making up for lost time, and the swifts are here in force. It is allowed to be summer now.

June 10, 2021
That Spring Feeling

The birds are teasing me this year. Wrens and blue tits have checked the pot out several times, but they are just eating the spiders and moving on. There are plenty of birds actually nesting here though – blackbirds, tree sparrows, robins, blue tits and great tits, chaffinches, and wrens – though where the wrens are I don’t know. There’s a male singing from the top of the birch tree and it’s already seen off two blackbirds and a couple of sparrows, but I can’t see where he goes. In fact the amount of (non-human) fornication and frolic in and around the garden has been unbelievable. Pigeons have been pushing each other off branches and rooftops for weeks, and there was a pair of wagtails chasing each other across the bridge.The frogs were late to the party, arriving only two weeks ago, but they were extremely prolific, and the tadpoles are growing nicely in spite of the frost and magpies who are nesting in next door’s big cypress tree, and all the other creatures who are likely to eat them.

In spite of the frosts all this week and the sunshine most days after it, the ground is very dry, but the primroses and anemones have had a very good spring

and the woodruff and tulips are just coming into their own. There are bumble bees pollinating the gooseberry and redcurrant blossoms, and outside there is plenty of wild cherry and blackthorn flower. The trees are greening and the orchard is gearing up for its annual blossom carnival. The last of the pink-footed geese headed north on Tuesday and the chiffchaffs are here. I haven’t seen swallows yet, though some people nearby have, and the ospreys have arrived at the nearby reserves.

Because of the housemove, I haven’t sowed too many seeds, and the garden is on care and maintenance only, but there arelettuces germinating in the greenhouse, and some annuals so the place doesn’t look too bereft once the bulbs are over. As the herbs begin to bulk up, I’ll be taking cuttings to take with us, but otherwise my effort is going into longterm planning for the next house, the next territtory I’ll be walking and getting to know. This tree has shaped so much of my perception of where I live now, it will be very odd to have different trees and birds. I notice that when I look at locations for potential houses, I always check for the nearest river!

Spring is hitting the poetry too lately. I am beginning to take bookings for when life opens up again, and there are two readings (one in June and one in October) and a potential workshop which I’ll talk more about nearer the time – no firm news about a launch of The Well of the Moon just yet – there is a lot of backlog to clear after all the chaos of the pandemic, but there will be more news as soon as I can share any. I am so looking forward to being out in the world again!

April 16, 2021

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