BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

garden

Signs and Portents

We are expecting two named storms this week – Dudley tomorrow, bringing wind, and possibly rain, and Eunice on Friday, bringing heavy snow. This winter, for all its mildness and rain, is testing me sorely. And yet—

The birds know spring is on its way. There was a pair of robins in the garden, not attacking each other, so possibly pairing up, the crows and jackdaws are working on their nests, and the woodland strip down to the park is full of birdsong. I discovered that our soil is even heavier, fuller of stones, and stickier with clay than I feared, but I have planted an apple and a damson tree, and some fruit bushes. There are more daffodils and tulips in the garden than I expected, all lengthening and greening every time I look at them, and I have a witch hazel in full flower, just waiting for the border to be cleared for it.

Other things are happening too. After two years of Zoom only launches, Red Squirrel Press have two LIVE events in the next fortnight – books by Helen Boden (A Landscape to Figure In) John Bolland (Pibroch) and Laura Fyfe (The Truth Lies) will be launched at Avant Garde

and on Saturday 26th February at 1pm in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. You will need to book tickets to ensure covid compliance and you can do so here.

I edited all three of these, so I know you will be in for a treat.

Poetry too, is beginning to break through – no finished poems, but a couple of drafts:

Time to look at the chaffinch on the feeder
the first primrose, almost transparent
in the winter wet – look, how beautiful,
look, how stubborn persistence wins through
against frost, look, pigeons amorous already,
look, catkins, look –

And some non-fiction projects have moved from the vague pipe dream stage, to structural plans and reading lists and task sheets. There are review notes in the planning process too, but they will have to wait. In March, someone is coming to build us a LIBRARY, and until then, all the books are in boxes. There will be painting of walls to do first, because the library is in what used to be a children’s playroom, painted lemon yellow and with cut-out woodland animals on the walls. I think there was a meme going around about women wanting a cottage in a forest with a herb garden and a library – and it does look as if I am getting close!

February 15, 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
August in the Territory of Rain

It is harvest time now, and the air is hot and heavy. The forecast promises us three days of thunderstorms, but so far the air is still and grey. SEPA have issued a flood alert, but actual floods are relatively rare here, as we are on the higher bank of the river. This is the apothecary border, which is peak flowery just now. As well as this mass of marigolds and lavender, we have the hyssops, the blue peeping out from behind the purple sage

and pink, with just a hint of goldenrod beside it, coming into flower.

It is also peak berry bug time, and as I have very thin Celtic skin, I try to go out in the garden only when wearing full protective clothing, otherwise my life becomes a misery. I had to harvest my herbs and the gooseberries and redcurrants in the gardener’s equivalent of a hazmat suit – tights under my trousers, which were tucked into socks, my t-shirt tucked into my trousers, elasticated cuff on my jacket, and muffled up to the chin with a scarf. It was sweltering! But thyme and oregano, lavender, marigold and yarrow are safely gathered and dried, and redcurrant and gooseberry jelly are in the cupboard for winter.

All the birds have fledged by now, and the new generations have taken over the garden. Usually we have sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds and starlings, but this year starlings have been fewer, and the space has been taken over by goldfinches which have been increasing in numbers over the last few years, bluetits, and for the first time, a group of long-tailed tits. Feeding the birds had to be stopped this year, as the riverbanks flooded in the winter, and rats moved into the village in large numbers, but this meant that pigeons were fewer, and it may have created safer spaces for the small birds. The swifts are gone, but the first clutches of swallows and housemartins are very busy over the fields and gardens.

Outside the village, the first barley fields are being harvested, and the wild raspberries are almost over. These are a yellow variety, which I’d never tried before, but which are delicious.

In the greenhouse, cuttings of herbs are putting down their first roots, peppers are fruiting, and I have picked the first tomato. It is an unusual variety, Paul Robeson, with very large fruit, with a Gothic tinge to it.

I’ll leave you with this poem about a garden tomato, first published in Gutter two years ago now.

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.

August 10, 2020
Midsummer Morning

We have got to Midsummer’s Day, and the weather is hot and sunny. The birds nesting in the garden have all flown, and people have begun to cut their hedges, and along by the river the yellowhammers are just leaving the nests, with their distinctive calls racketing through the hawthorns and alders they seem to like.

It is peak herb this week, with roses, lavender, woodruff (I’m a little too late for this really, but I’ll dry it anyway, to use as a fixative for potpourri), chickweed, self-heal and clover all ready for harvesting, and peppermint and yarrow bulking up. The traditional midsummer herbs, St. John’s wort and meadowsweet are not yet flowering here, but they are close. There are chopped chives in the freezer, and basil ready for making pesto.

These are the first of the marigolds, which I sowed back in the autumn, and forgot about. There will be plenty more from the spring sowing, and they will last well into the autumn.

The plants that dominate the garden this week, however, are the ferns. They have some association with this time of year, with fairies and with midsummer magic. It was believed that you could sprinkle fern seed in your shoe and become invisible – more on this website.

This one is the hart’s tongue fern.

and this is polypody. A lot of ferns have had traditional medicinal uses, but they are most welcome in my garden for their refreshing green in the glare of summer, and because they will cope with shade.

Posting here may be a little erratic over the next few weeks. Lockdown has been tough on all of us, and especially on some of my family, and we all need a bit of chilling time. But I will be writing and gardening, and I hope there will be a newsletter soon, inspred by clover. Enjoy the summer!

June 24, 2020
Living la Vida Lockdown-Here Comes the Sun

It’s the warmest day so far, and the garden is looking quite pretty. I’m not the only one taking photos today – my daughter has caught me in the act of actual gardening, harvesting thyme.

I have moved on to the planting out stage, the tomatoes are in the greenhouse border, and the aubergines are in bigger pots. There are planters full of ammi majus, lupins and cerinthe, and fennel and agastache are in the borders. There are helichrysum, mollucella and nicandra which I will dry for winter flower arrangements, and annual seeds in the gaps left by the bulbs which have gone over. My initial optimism about the germination of said seeds has since been damped by the realisation that a lot of the green shoots have turned out to be hairy bittercress and willow herb, but you never know. The recent rain has done wonders for everything!

Mostly I include rather pleasnat pictures of my activities, but you’ll be glad to know there are no photos of the comfrey liquid I’ve just strained and stored in old milk cartons. It smells particularly vile, but it is rich in potassium and the tomatoes and fruit bushes will be getting a very healty watering of this stuff over the next few months. More photogenically, I have started to harvest my herbs, first making a dandelion muscle rub for aches and tightness, and a violet leaf oil for skin sensitivity, and now drying thyme on a rack I made years ago from a muslin nappy tacked to a frame of leftover 2×2 struts.

I’m also making chive flower vinegar, which is coloured implausibly pink, and has a faint onion taste in salad dressings

Poetry is harder to come by. You might like to see, among many other good things, a poem I have in the latest edition of Stravaig, but there is very little new work of my own happening just now. However, I have started work on a new Red Squirrel Press pamphlet to be published in October, so I haven’t lost all my poetry muscles!

In Scotland we hope to hear more about the roadmap for coming out of lockdown tomorrow. It has been an anxious time, but one that has brought out both the best in our communities, and the strange and dangerous gaps in our politics economy and social and environmental thinking. I’m sure many people have been thinking how we can implement the lessons we have learned!

May 20, 2020
Saving Seeds

nigella and ivy

We have got to the time of year when the mornings are dewy and the last flowers are making a brave show amid the wreckage of summer. This seems to have happened very fast. Last week, there was a magnificent array of marigolds and the first sprays of montbretia around the pond. This week there is a scattered few, and I am saving seed for next year.

I have teasel seed, too, and pods of evening primrose

You can see the split in the pod where the seed is ready to fall out. I will have to be careful where I use these seeds – they are prolific, and long-lasting, and will come up everywhere.

The birds are still getting used to the change in the weather. I am aware of robins’ winter song in the hedges and apple trees, and of the daring of one who turns over anywhere I have been digging or clearing, looking for disturbed insects. Starlings arrived, and moved on south, and swallows still appear, the last stragglers from northerly parts, moving ahead of the blustery weather. Geese are here, but in transit, and as I was gardening on Sunday, seven whooper swans flew over the village following the river down towards the Gartmorn dam and Cambus ponds, where there are reserves which will offer them shelter, and where I hope we’ll see them over the winter. The first apples are being harvested.

The birds are coming back into the garden now the fields are being ploughed, little ninja blue tits and great tits emerging from the rowan leaves, the first sparrows doing the bird equivalent of leaving towels on the loungers in the thick privet hedges that make secure hiding places from predators. Sparrowhawks and buzzards follow them back into the village, and you can sometimes spot them, the buzzard circling high over the riverbank, the sparrowhawk cruising the lines of the hedges. Sometime they get ambitious and go for the pigeons that raid the bird feeders, and we find neat circles of grey feathers on the grass.

There are still butterflies, but numbers are thinning, and the wasps and spiders are making themselves evident. The darker evenings make it possible to see bats earlier – they move too fast for me to identify them, but local naturalists have recorded pipistrelles, so I imagine that’s what they are. The deer will be moving into the fields and the reedbeds, moving closer to the village every year, and at the highest tides around the equinox, we’ll be looking for otters, seals coming up following the fish, and even occasionally a porpoise.

Bust as the winter comes closer, poetry gets more lively. Two poets I’ve edited will have pamphlets launched during the next month, and I’ll be reading at LoveCrumbs in the West Port in Edinburgh tomorrow, and at St Ninians’s Library as part of an event celebrating National Poetry Day. There will be an event post about this soon, but the others are up already, along with a workshop I’ll be leading as part of the WriteAngle’s One Weekened in Stirling.

One of those events listed happened yesterday, a fundraiser for Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank Cottage, which has fallen into disrepair. It was an excellent night, with readings from Richie McCaffery, ( apoet in residence in 2011) Gerry Cambridge, (a Brownsbank Fellow) and Colin Will, and a fascinating and generous introduction and poems from Alan Riach. There was a raffle with irresistible prizes to a MacDiarmid enthusiast, donated by Richie McCaffery. We made a good start on the fund-raising, but there is a long way to go, so please visit the website, and if you can, make a donation.

September 12, 2019
High Summer

It is a mixed summer – the swifts were late, but arrived in numbers, and they’ll be gone again by next week. There were lots of butterflies in April, then none, and now lots of small tortoiseshells and whites. The weather was very dry, then wet, then hot and thundery. The lime blossom is over but the buddleia is out, and the first rownas are turning red. The garden is at its peak of production just now, and all the weak points are showing up – the places where mildew has hit, the fruit bushes under attack from sawfly, the places where some things have grown too big, and other things come to nothing. On the whole, I’m quite pleased – the lavender is finally doing what I wanted it to do

I got a good haul of redcurrants and gooseberries, most of the seeds I planted have germinated, the pond is full of invertebrates and amphibians, and there’s plenty of colour and butterfly, bird and bee action.

But now is the time when you start to reckon up, and think about the next year. As I go through the harvest, drying herbs, freezing tomato sauce, and trying new dye plants, I’m beginning to think – but what next? is this doing what I expected? what will the garden need from me next year?

So too with this blog. There will be a short hiatus while I have a holiday, and deal with all the garden things, and set up next winter’s writing and editing projects. But also I’ll be thinking what to do with this blog. It seems to have hit the doldrums, between one book and the next, and one family or political drama after another, and I need to whistle up a wind to take me to the next phase.

The newsletters will continue steadily – it will be marigold next time, and looking at form – and I certainly won’t stop posting. But I have had a couple of projects brewing behind the scenes coming out of the research I’ve been doing for the next collection, and if I can get them properly evolved, it might be interesting to share them here. There are a few people who follow the blog who are less interested in poetry, and more interested in herbs (and well-being generally), or in the environment, and what responses we might make to all the stuff that goes on, or the society we will need to build to deal with it. Well, I’m quite interested in those things myself (it’s where the poetry comes from), and though my research is a bit random, there’s a lot of it, and a lot of hard thinking I don’t want going to waste. I just have to work out what might be interesting to other people, and find a good way to present it.

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you might have an opinion on this – please comment if so – either here or on my Facebook page.

July 24, 2019
The Bees

There are about five bees here, all enjoying yesterdays sunshine. There are three carder bees and two white-tailed bumble bees.

I’m think this is a hairy-footed flower bee.

I suspect there may be miner bees here too. We used to have them in our walls a few years ago, and they were quite disconcerting as they headed for the cracks round the windows. They were surprisingly noisy too. They aren’t nesting there now, but we have plenty of other places for them to hide.

We have done very well for bees for the last few years, and exceptionally well this year. I was telling myself that thirty-seven years of organic gardening had paid off, but I caught a glimpse of a deer on the river bank and an awful thought occurred to me. The deer are coming closer because they are running out of wilder places to be. What if the bees are here, not because our garden is quite friendly, but because everywhere else is so barren?

I’m not giving in to this thought, however. Plenty of people in the village and more across the river, are planting bee friendly plants (there’s a new wildflower meadow germinating in one previously well-manicured lawn) and feeding birds. There’s someone nearby who rears thousands of peacock butterflies and releases them each year. The farmer has planted trees along the edges of the road, and the council are much less fanatical about mowing the verges, so we have had a lot of cow parsley this year.

The biggest change is the birds. Twenty years ago you could walk along the road into the village past the fields and hear nothing but the occasional jackdaw, or sometimes skylarks. Then you would come into the village and it was like turning the radio on, as birds were in every garden. Now we have plenty of skylarks – I’m promising myself to go out and record their songs one evening when the rain stops – more swallows than ever zipping across the road in front of you, and a lot of these:

goldfinch

They are everywhere. It’s not all good news. We don’t see half the curlews flying over that we used to, and there are no lapwings at all. But good things are happening – not enough, I admit, and there are many setbacks – but there is enough good to encourage us, enough of a nucleus to build on. The sound of bees in my garden is like a spring of hope.

June 5, 2019
February Happenings

When you see these flowers in bloom you know that spring can’t be far off. I’ve ordered my seeds, but not sowed any yet, nor written any new poetry, but there are some special circumstances. So far February has been a very busy month, with book editing, a trip to London to see the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts exhibition in the British Library (I’ve seen the Beowulf manuscript! I’ve seen a letter written by the scholar and bishop Alcuin to Charlemagne!), a trip to Liverpool with most of my family to celebrate my sister’s sixtieth birthday, and my daughter having a major operation, and living with us while she recovers.

I have been trying out the paces of the new camera. It can do a lot – it can practically talk to me – but it can’t do close ups so well. I’m going to need a macro lens for the flowers, and maybe a long range one for birds – this is getting expensive! but it is worth it for the way it makes me see things in more detail and in their proper context.

I’m hoping to translate this into new and rather different poems. I’ve been reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, and it is like fireworks going off in my brain – the connections between words, lines, subjects and responses are not sequential but sensual, mostly visual, like mind maps. There are plays on sounds and language and visual as well as semantic connections, and you could almost read them in any direction. I am fairly sure that I couldn’t do anything like that – I get lost too easily. But after reading those poems my brain was ready for what happened next.

I am in the middle of reading Leechcraft by S Pollington, alternately impressed by the depths of his scholarship and startled by the limits of his actual experience. His identifications of plants refer to many learned sources, but I’m not sure he has ever seen any of them in his life, and he doesn’t seem aware of the many vernacular healing traditions recorded in Europe. But then I came across an exhaustive analysis of the many uses of the word ‘laec’ which became ‘leech’ and was later sometimes used as a synonym for ‘doctor’.

Pollington says that this was not the way the word was used in Old English, and quotes many sources where the word is used to mean ‘healing’, ‘exercise of skill’, ‘play’ or ‘a rite of sacrificial offering’. I once heard Patrick Stewart use the word ‘laiking’ for being variously ‘truanting from school’, ‘on holiday’ and ‘out of work’, and when I pushed this, something fell into place. ‘Laec’ 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. ‘Laec’ 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 no wonder that industrialists and politicians like to confuse it with idleness and amusement, because it’s the stuff that can’t be bought and sold, and no-one else can do it for you.

This provided the link between my random musings about colour, craft, tradition and memory, the sense of self and the bond with community. I’m off on a poetic journey, but before I go, I’ll leave you with another spring-time picture from my garden.

February 18, 2019

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