BurnedThumb

Things are happening in the garden.It’s light now when Lucy and I leave for school. Birds are obviously claiming territories and checking out nesting sites. There has been sunshine today, and I have the washing out for the first time this year. We’ve had the smallest possible helping of the very first broccoli.

In the greenhouse the endives are beginning to put on leaf, and the herb cuttings that have overwintered are perking up nicely.

The rhubarb looks encouraging, and buds are swelling on the fruit bushes.

There are new shoots in the flower garden, on the valerian

and the peonies.

The blog has been quite slow of late,because things have changed a lot round here. We finalised the content of the latest Stravaig, and I finished a set of Huldra poems. And then my younger daughter moved back home to start a new job, and we’ve been to reconfiguring the house to accommodate her, and in readiness for the visits of number 2 grandchild – due in the summer. It’s meant a lot of clearing, cleaning and repurposing, several trips to charity shops and to the tip, and a lot of rethinking how I use my time and space.Gardening is about to start in earnest, too. One project that I have planned is a ‘fairy garden’ which Lucy and I are going to plant, with soi-disant roses and candytuft, zinnia ‘thumbelina’and ‘ballerina’ poppies, and snapdragons, so I’m gearing up for sowing those seeds, as well as peppers, tomatoes and rosemary.Poetry seems to be taking a back seat, but I’m eagerly waiting for the entries to the Red Squirrel Competition – due any day now! The snowdrops are just hitting their stride, and so, I hope, am I.

This mild weather has brought out the yellow flowers of winter. Who knew?

I started a spring cleaning in the herb patch and the greenhouse.

And I brought the tiniest possible sprig of wirchhazel into the house. It smells amazing – a cosmetic, slightly medicinal smell, incense and primroses and maybe soap.

I made the first territory walk of the year, just about dusk, and a skein of pink-footed geese was heading over the fields and down the Hillfoot Road towards Alloa. The Ochils looked serene and peaceful as the quiet night came in. I am hoping this will be the first of many walks this year, and lead to a lot more poems!

If you were thinking about entering the Red Squirrel Poetry Competition and didn’t get round to it, you now have another month to do it. The closing date has been extended to the 31st January. Good luck, everybody!

These are old photos, taken about this time of year, but two years ago. That’s because the last couple of weeks have been taken up with family things – our son’s graduation (in nursing – with distinction – which is an enormous pleasure) my mother’s move into residential care, and absorbing the outside school responsibilities of looking after our grand-daughter into a busy life – and cooking up a poetry night at our local coffee house. But I think you can take it that the territory of rain still looks pretty much like this!

We got the roof fixed just in time before the rain, and the central heating pump replaced just before the frost. And the upgrade to the broadband went without a hitch, so I can now listen to the radio on my laptop without it having to pause for breath every five minutes. Now we are having the sittingroom and the hall decorated. We have had to move four bookcases to accommodate this, and it’s not a big house, there are books everywhere! There is dust everywhere too. I knew I was a B- housewife but really, there are places behind bookcases where finding the original carpet is like archaeology. But it will be done by Christmas, and there are new bookcases (larger!) coming, so everywhere will be not only cleaner and fresher, but tidier.

Outside the only vegetables flourishing are the brassicas – kale and cabbage and early broccoli seem unfazed by all the wet. And the birds are back, drawn in mostly by the frost. I’ve seen redwings and fieldfares, there are swans on the river, and the Scandinavian starlings are here in force. And I’ve just seen a greater spotted woodpecker on the top of the birch outside my window. I thought it was a starling at irst, but it’s too big, and piebald. Other people have told me we have woodpeckers, but this is the first year I’ve seen them regularly for myself. Also blackbirds. I know blackbirds are supposed to be territorial, but in winter they seem to move about mob-handed, and there are about eight of them bobbing about the garden, knocking each other off the patch below the feeders where the small birds scatter the seed.

We are coasting towards the end of the calendar year, and we are already in Advent, which is the start of the liturgical year, so it’s a good time to be quiet, review and assess things before we make a new start. So I’ll be doing just that in the next few posts

After going on for ages about how the birds have been all over the garden, eating us out of house and home and hawthorn berries, last week was eerily quiet. I topped up the feeders, and they stayed full for days, much to the chagrin of the woodpigeons, who depend on small birds to knock the seed down for them. I watched my neighbour’s garden enviously – she is more efficient and more generous than I am, and her feeders are always busy, but no, her garden was empty too.

I did see the sparrowhawk a couple of times, and there’s a grey squirrel and a couple of visiting cats, but they don’t visit often enough, I’d have thought, to put all the birds off so completely. The fields are ploughed and the winter wheat is already sprouting, so they can’t be in the stubble, and almost all the berries along the river have gone, so they can’t have found alternative food sources. So where are they? and why have they gone?

I wondered if the birds I had seen were migratory, and they’ve just pushed on further south, ahead of the bad weather. I’ve never noticed this before, but maybe I should have. I was getting anxious, wondering about diseases or pollution that hadn’t registered on the human scale. A silent spring didn’t seem out of the question.

However, in the last day or two activity seems to have picked up. There are small flocks of starlings about now, and I can hear the cross ‘ticking’ sounds of blue tits in the hedges as I go out in the mornings. Either the sparrowhawk has moved on, and resident birds are more confident, or new arrivals from northern parts have arrived to fill the gaps. There are crows and magpies calling, and a robin territory-marking the garden from his post on the gate. Even trade on the feeders has picked up. Good.

At the bottom of the road is a japanese maple outside a cottage (Maple Cottage, would you believe?). It is the last tree to change colour, and almost always the last tree to lose its leaves. But there’s a very blustery westerly gale outside, and the leaves are coming off in bucketloads. This weekend I’ll be gathering them to make leafmould for next winter, but for now I’m just marvelling at the difference in my perspective. The garden seems smaller now, and much more exposed – not just to the wind and rain, but to my neighbours and the people using the village hall behind our house. It doesn’t bother me, as my neighbours are nice people, but it’s very different.

The birds seem to feel differently about it too. The great spotted woodpecker which I first saw in the garden a fortnight ago, is much more conspicuous, and as there aren’t so many places to shelter while you’re eyeing up what’s in the feeders, the sparrowhawk has begun to hang about in a meaningful manner. Fortunately our privet hedge is very thick and will keep its leaves over the winter, so the coal tits and sparrows are reasonably safe.

The blustery weather has brought in winter migrants. There was a fieldfare on the birch tree this morning and a flock of waxwings in the trees by the railway station yesterday, noisily finishing off all the cotoneaster berries. I hope they will find enough to keep them going. As far as I can see, only the hawthorn has anything like its usual crop. I can see myself putting out a lot of supplementary food over the winter.

In the human community, my family celebrated the christening of our youngest member, my great-neice Niamh, a very happy occasion which meant that there were more of us in one place than there has been for years. And now I am home, I am going through the submissions for the second issue of Stravaig. They look very promising so far! Submissions have closed and we hope to publish on-line in the new year, so watch this space.

Another space to watch. Art Angel Dundee are holding a fund-raising event this weekend. This is a brilliant project, producing some high class art as well as excellent results for their service users, so please, if you are in the area, pop in and see what’s going on.

This pottery witch was made a long time ago by my youngest daughter, so it’s just right to start a post on Hallowe’en!

My grand-daughter and I made this lantern yesterday. I know it was a small cultivar – wee be little – but this is ridiculous. It’s a testament to how poor the summer has been. On the other hand, said grand-daughter took it into school today and everyone thought it was ‘so cute’. One of the mothers said she was going to go to Tesco to see if she could buy a small one like that, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her!

Other things like the wet. There’s nothing wrong with the kale:

or the cabbages and the chillis don’t seem to mind it either.

But this is the reality of this week. In the wind last Thursday there was a sudden rattling on the roof as leaves in their thousands left the trees. I can see the railway line through the trees, and even as far as the windfarm on Sherriffmuir from my window. The world is opening out as if the orchard had drawn back a curtain. For all the shorter days, winter here is the time of vision.

Abbey Craig

High on the grey rock
autumn lights a burning torch
oak among alders.

It’s like watching a slow fire from my window. The beeches are turning coppery, the birch yellow, the maples red and the sycamores every shade of flame from sepia to bronze. Bringing Lucy home from school is complicated by leaf scuffling and walks ‘in the forest’ – the avenues of lime and cherry trees that were planted on the river bank only thirty-five years ago, but which have always been part of my acquaintance with the territory of rain.

On Sunday we went further afield, to Aberfoyle, where we saw this amazing stagshorn fungus. We go there often, and I’ve written three poems about it, for spring, summer and autumn.

Naming the Autumn

A mite in the hills’ green folds,
I walk, naming the autumn –
coal tit, oakmoss, bracket fungus.
I mark the whiskered outgrowths
of blaeberries and whin, and hollows
where primroses will flavour spring
with sunlight and honey. I know
which woods are good for burning
and where the Highland fault line cuts
the ancient metamorphic rock
from fertile sandstones in the south.
A net of sweeping birch twigs sifts
the wind, and catches strands of lichen,
ice-green and hairy. Taxonomy
fails me. I cannot bring to mind
its name, or whether it’s the sort
I need to make a winter pot-pourri.
No matter. The art of knowing
is knowing when to let things be.

Now I feel I should do one for winter!I can’t say I like it so much since they put in the zipline, but it’s hard to grudge people an experience that they obviously enjoy so much.

One new thing I do like, however, is the wildlife hide, where we saw this irresistibly cute resident.

I am glad to know that the squirrel and bird populations are going to be supported this year, because I’ve been shocked to see how few berries and acorns there are. Last year, I know, was a ‘mast year’ when trees bear heavily, so I expected a certain falling off, but the weather has been so poor that wildlife is going to struggle if we don’t help. The good people at the Loch of the Lowes were only saying yesterday how many underweight hedgehogs they’ve seen, so the plan Lucy and I have made for a hedgehog house looks very timely!

Can I just give a last call for submissions fro the Stravaig magazine? We’d like artwork or filmclips as well as poetry or essays if anyone has them, on the theme of ‘coast to coast’. Submissions to burnedthumb@gmail.com, please, by 1st November.

This is pretty much the view from my window just now.It’s grey and wet and the sky is heavy with featureless cloud. The leaves are turning, thanks to all the frosty nights and clear bright days we had last week and the last apples, too high to pick, are like copper buttons on the trees in the orchard. But the most significant event in the territory of rain is one I can’t photograph.

Morning and evening, every day for the last week, hundreds of geese have passed over heading west and a little north,(mostly right to left as you’re looking at that photo),towards the fields of the Carse of Stirling and Flanders Moss. They are mostly pink-footed geese, as you can tell from their cry (‘pinks wink’ as the saying goes), but there are also some greylags (greys honk), and once a skein of whooper swans strung out along the shoulder of Dumyat like a silver necklace. Some fly high and look like those m-shaped scribbles children use to draw sea-gulls. Some fly low and the sun catches on their wings and turns them to silver and black. But the noise is incredible, a peal of bells, a playground of rowdy children, a pack of hounds in full cry.

It’s no wonder that stories grew up around the flight of the geese. You can hear them at night too, when it isn’t just loud, it’s as eerie as those vixen cries or screech owl calls they use on television programmes to indicate the isolation and terror of the countryside. People believed that it was the ‘Wild Hunt’ or the ‘Gabriel Hounds’ hunting for lost souls, or the souls of those about to die in the coming winter, and I’m not surprised. I love it. As human life retreats indoors to firelight and storecupboard cooking, it’s good to hear the clamour from outside and remember that the winter landscape hasn’t been abandoned to the wind and frost.