BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

herbs

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
How Green is My Hilltop

Everything greened up overnight. The alchemilla went from a tight nub of unfolding leaves to a whole clump of spreading leaf-fans and a fountain of emerging acid-yellow flowers. The thyme stretched five centimetres and put out purple buds. The broom bushes are fountains of gold and the hawthorns look like the last scene of Ghost Busters, with foamy cream coloured blossom sprayed everywhere.

Last year the weather was so cold and damp for so long I bought a dehydrator, but even so, drying herbs for the winter was long and tedious, and I had to have three or even four sessions for some things. This year was a very different story. I harvested thyme, alchemilla and purple sage in great quantities, and stuck everything in at once. And ten hours later, I had a lot of good quality herbs, with no wastage. I am very impressed.

The last few days of hot and sunny weather have done wonders for the seedlings. The tomatoes are in their final pots already, and and growing visibly. I’ve planted up some pots for the summer, with santolina and purple sage and lavender and bergamot, and I’ve planted out southernwood and mugwort into the garden. I had to clear a space for the mugwort in the magical border, which you might think has enough gallus herbs already, but I think it will cope. I am intrigued by this herb, as a great many people have been before me:

First, you are called, oldest of herbs.
You have the power · over three, over thirty.
You have power over venom, · over airborne infection.
You have power over the evil one · who wanders the world.
Lacnunga

Many people use it for magical purposes, to protect against evil, or to develop their feminine side, their sensitivity, or prophetic abilities. It is one of the large group of moon herbs, perhaps because of the silvery felted underside of its leaves, and Lucy Jones, the herbalist, says ‘If you find yourself travelling along (country) lanes by the light of the moon, you will notice that the silvery leaves of the Mugwort shine prominently…. if you have never noticed the appearance of Mugwort on a moonlit night, you have missed something special.’ In my garden it is just to the left of marshmallow, and in front of elecampane (also known as elf-wort), behind the ‘little wizard’ alchemilla, and not far from vervain and yarrow, so this is one powerful magical cocktail, if that’s your thing. I’m not sure if it’s mine, but I like the idea of the mugwort leaves at night, like Coleridge’s icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon.

As well as herbs, I’m growing flowers for drying, statice, safflower, teasel and for seed heads, quaking grass, poppies and nicandra, which has papery twisted seed cases of a dramatic inky blue. Most of them are in the front garden, in the pollinator patch, but poppy and teasel rogue seedlings turn up everywhere, along with the delightful surprise of heartsease, which hitched a ride in the flower pots I brought with me. There isn’t much colour in my garden yet, but it’s lush with green. I can’t get enough of it.

May 13, 2024
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
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
Out of my Head and into the Garden

We hit a milestone this week. when I went out this morning it was light for the first time, and although it is cold and wet, and was seriously icy this morning, this is the week that gardening finally got outside.

I’ve done a bit of clearing, and weeded the world’s smallest knot garden. Nothing is looking very bright there yet, (so no photos), but it looks as though all the plants have come through the winter. The southernwood plants are bare and floppy, and I was convinced I’d lost one, but there are buds forming on even the most puny and motheaten, and I have some confidence.

I am not so sure about my lavenders, however. They look as though they have taken a bashing, and though there may well be some regrowth as the weather warms up, I’m convinced I’ve lost a few. I should have overwintered them in the greenhouse, with the agapanthus and myrtle and some other stuff i got nervous about. Mostly this paid off, and there are signs of new growth on the mint, myrtle and tarragon. I took some cuttings of scented-leaf geraniums and lavender dentata, and most of them are well-rooted. I potted them up yesterday, and they are looking quite perky.

I’ve also made some thyme disinfectant, which you make by boiling up a lot of the prunings of the thyme currently billowing all over the steps with plenty of water for about an hour. You get a very sinister brown liquid which smells, but not too strongly, of herbs, and which has a reputation for being useful in combating germs – even MRSA and other troublesome strains of bacteria. This is just in time for some heavy duty spring-cleaning coming up over the next week or two – the disnfectant will keep, in a cold place, for about a month.

Next week is StAnza, and I will be there for most of it. My head is spinning with all the good things on offer, which you can discover here, but I’m particularly looking forward to Clare Trevien’s Shipwrecked House, a workshop with Gerrie Fellowes about poetry sequences, and a poetry breakfast (which comes with Danish pastries, as if I won’t have had a StAndrews breakfast) with Christine de Luca, Kei Miller and others. This is all well and good, but it means I’ll be leaving the seed sowing until after I get back. And then garden gardening will begin in earnest.

February 25, 2015
Between Duende and Zen

I’ve been thinking a lot about duende lately. It’s been on the edges of my consciousness since I started thinking about folk music while writing the Eurydice Rising Sequence (which seems a long time ago now). I was looking at traditional forms, the sean nos of Ireland, and the ‘traditional style’ of Scots Gaelic, and the most interesting thing I discovered is that there is almost nothing written down about it. Even the Mods, where the judging is exact and technical, don’t seem to have any defined criteria. There is slightly more discussion about sean nos, because there has been a significant style shift, from a melody heavily ornamented with grace notes to something much more simple, but again, no definition. The best I can find is ‘it’s got to have soul’. I can recognise it when I hear it, though.

Sean Nos

The stillness of the old musicians,
singing at the bar’s end, eyes closed,
is a thing you wouldn’t notice, unless
you sing yourself. The skill doesn’t show
in dynamics and drama, it’s rubbed hard
down into the song’s grain till the voice
glides silky and free and nothing comes
between mind and melody. Sean nos
is of the soul, a music gathered,
in-dwelling, sung from the quick of the heart.

If you want to hear the real thing, the best sean nos singer I have ever heard is Iarla Ó Lionaird from The Gloaming. Check out especially the track Necklace of Wrens, which is the setting from a poem by Michael Hartnett.
While I was thinking about ‘soul’ however, the word duende kept cropping up, and I’ve been reading Lorca’s In Search of Duende. Lorca describes the duende as an earth spirit, possibly related to the Scandinavian trolls, or the British boggart, someone to keep on side if you want to live in places it has chosen for its own. More northern creatures are mostly seen as mischievous and unruly, although Halldor Laxness writes about a truly destructive demon called Kollumkilli (possibly a distortion of Columcille, because the demon lives near Celtic monastic ruins which the first Icelanders found when they settled the country) in his novel Independent People. The Spanish duende, on the other hand, is downright inimical. Peasant life in Spain is a fight to the death with the thing.
And it’s a particular kind of fight, a bit like tai chi. I only had one tai chi lesson, and I’m so dyspraxic I couldn’t follow the instructions, but I did grasp the concept. In most fighting styles, you attack and recover, you are concerned with self-defence and holding a little energy in reserve, but in tai chi you commit totally to one mighty move, pouring all your energy into the most effective blow you can. A fight with duende is like that, and the art forms with duende, particularly the canto jondo, have that distinctive sound. I imagine that blues does too. Music is a powerful weapon against the thrawn-ness of adversity.
We are experiencing adversity on a global scale and there is no doubt about it, even in the comfortable bits of the first world, and music and arts of all kinds are responding to it. The Dark Mountain project is one that I have been involved with, but everywhere you look, something is happening as people are trying to articulate the meaning of what is happening. But there are other patterns of behaviour too – spiritual renewals on a parallel with the Ghost dancing movement of the First Nations, or the development of monasticism in post imperial Europe; a return to nature as in the rivers and mountains movement in Classical Chinese poetry or pastoral poetry in Latin; an engagement with the ancestors and tribal traditions, radical politics and a fascination with magic.
And here my thinking comes back to its origins. Because wherever these changes and upheaval and renewals happen, herbs become iconic. The shape of the herb poems I’m going to work on is beginning to come into view.

February 13, 2015
The Adventure in Progress

For the next four months or so, the territory of rain is going to look like this. There are still leaves clinging to very sheltered trees, but not so many now. Teal, merganser and goldeneye are back on the river, and the sparrows are very quick to notice when I fill up the bird feeder. I have winter pansies and some cyclamen in pots which are still in flower, but even the last brave marigold is gone from the garden.

And that is the end of the herb posts for this year, because I foolishly forgot to take photographs. However, there are still fourteen posts outstanding and next year I aim to catch up with what I owe, as well as keeping a record of the herb-related activities I’m planning. There will be herb teas, seasonings, oils and vinegars, some basic remedies, candied angelica (which I’ve always wanted to try), some household cleaners, and perhaps some more adventurous experiments.

Meanwhile here’s a list of what I’ve grown this year:

• alecost
• alkanet
• angelica
• avens
• basil
• bay
• betony
• borage
• calamus
• carnation
• chamomile
• chervil
• chives
• comfrey
• cowslip
• cyclamen
• dandelion
• english mace
• fennel
• feverfew
• foxglove
• gaultheria
• heartease
• hellebore – mixed purple and white, christmas rose
• honeysuckle
• horehound
• horsetail
• houseleek
• hyssop – pink and blue
• ivy
• japonica
• jasmine
• ladys mantle
• Lavenders – blue madrid, white madrid, lavender alba, lavender arles , lavender avignon, lavender dentata, lavender rosea
• lemon balm
• lemon verbena
• lily of the valley
• marigold
• marjoram
• Mints – apple mint, eau de cologne mint, mount atlas mint, peppermint, spearmint
• monarda – fireball, citriodora
• mullein
• myrtle
• nasturtium
• nettle
• oregano
• orris
• parsley
• pink
• poppy
• primrose
• roman wormwood
• roses – alba, gallica, sweetbriar, zephirine drouhin
• rosemary
• sages – green sage, purple sage
• santolina
• scented geraniums – apple, lemon, rose
• sorrel
• southernwood
• st john’s wort
• sweet cicely
• sweet rocket
• tansy
• tarragon
• thymes – common thyme, lemon thyme
• violet
• winter savory
• woodruff
• yarrow

Meanwhile, on the family front, phase one of our adventure is over. We have three new jobs and one new house. Another house move is under way and a new business venture is in preparation. A tricky shift in a health situation has gone well, and things all around are beginning to look up.

Although I’ll be pretty busy between now and Christmas, (like everybody else!) I’m back to writing and planning for next year. I have been reading a lot of good new poetry over the summer, and I hope my next post will include some reviews and recommendations. It will be nice to feel like a poet again!

November 17, 2014

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