By: everylittlething

As soon as the unsold Christmas items are off the supermarket shelves, the chocolate eggs appear for Easter. Theologically, I can see a link – but I suspect that God has very little to do with this commercial venture. I’m not pretending that I don’t get excited when I give and receive Easter eggs. They are still a treat for this wean of an adult. Some parents carefully hide small eggs in their gardens so that their offspring can have the fun of finding them. Weather permitting. Traditionally, children would go around their communities asking for eggs – but not chocolate ones. Hens’ eggs were a treat, especially as the church decreed that they shouldn’t be eaten during Lent. Hens didn’t appreciate that their eggs weren’t needed so they kept on laying, and people were pleased to share their stored eggs with anyone who asked for them at Easter.

We always buy free range hens’ eggs from the butcher around the corner. We consider them to be of really good value. Recently we have been given a generous number of eggs by a friend who has a smallholding. A princely gift. Holding each one in my hand, while washing it, I consider the chicken and the egg conundrum. The answer is beyond me. Some are able to use scientific knowledge and skill to fertilize eggs but we cannot answer the chicken/egg question. A hen’s egg is pleasing to hold- it is as if one is taking in some small part of its magic. What powerful magic.

During my time as an infant teacher I had lots of fun teaching the little ones simple songs and rhymes. The simpler they were, the better to remember. Irene Pawsey’s short poem for children, “An Egg For Easter”, is one such :

“I want an egg for Easter,
A browny egg for Easter;
I want an egg for Easter,
So I’ll tell my browny hen.
I’ll take her corn and water,
And show her what I’ve brought her,
And she’ll lay my egg for Easter,
Inside her little pen.”

This ditty is an early lesson for children. Feed and water your hen and you will have your reward.

Even now, after several decades of cooking and baking with eggs, I still feel privileged when I crack open an egg with a double yolk. Or should that be two yolks? The puzzle reminds me of my studies in child development – should one refer to “the twins” or NEVER mention the word “twin” to those two people conceived at the same time?

When the sperm has fertilized the egg, there is the wonderful circle of life in evidence. But which came first?

As children, my brother and I were interested in birds’ eggs but it was really considered a boy’s hobby. Sexism was rife in the good old days. Michael was given someone’s collection of birds’ eggs, carefully preserved in sawdust-filled “Snowcem” tins. This, like a grown-up friend’s butterfly collection, is frowned upon now and I fully understand the thinking behind such condemnation. I have to say, though, that such collections were part and parcel of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and they passed on an awareness and respect for the natural world.

The Willett and Hall “Pocket Book of Common British Birds” has descriptions of the eggs produced by each bird. This book is now considered outdated and many identification guides which are published today, omit the eggs completely – as if the birds give birth to live young. Well I, for one, am not going to steal eggs, I am just interested. Edith Holden captures my imagination with her observations of Nature and her ability to conjure up a vibrant tableau with what is very simple vocabulary, always surprises me:

“April 29th. Gathered some Wild Geranium and Wild Hyacinth. Saw a lovely little Hedge-sparrow’s nest in a Whin-bush with four eggs in it. The Gorse was in full bloom and made a glowing contrast with the blue eggs in the mossy nest. ”

In our house we have many books. We have some very beautiful books which require care but one of my favourites is a tiny tan-coloured book measuring nine cms. by fourteen and a half cms.. I have the dust cover in pieces. “The Observer’s Book Of Birds’ Eggs “. In it you are able to find details of the eggs of just about every bird to breed in Britain – and a sensible list of dont’s :

* don’t handle the eggs or disarrange the nest

* don’t spend more than a minute at the nest

* don’t disturb the natural cover

* don’t leave a track for others to follow

* don’t visit a nest more than once in twenty four hours

and

* never try to hunt for the nests of rare birds.

There are many casualties in the springtime. Birds like the magpie will make a meal of other birds’ eggs. We don’t have magpies here in Caithness but there is plenty of marauding going on along the sea cliffs. The herring gull is one such marauder. Guillemots, shags and cormorants should know the danger of leaving their eggs unprotected. And everyone knows what little killers the baby cuckoos are. They push all of the chicks and unhatched eggs out of their foster-parents’ home so that the fat little cuckoo creature gets the undivided attention of the dunnocks or reed warblers. These are the birds chosen as host by the female cuckoo. Sometimes meadow pipits may be chosen. Whichever bird is chosen to foster the cuckoo’s egg and, later, the chick, the cuckoo’s egg will match that bird’s own egg. Cuckoos have small eggs for their size so that the victims do not realise there is a new egg in the nest. Not only that, but the female cuckoo will remove an egg from the nest and eat it before laying her own egg there.

Eggs are not, exclusively, birds’. You and I are here to prove that. We tend to refer to the human egg as ovum (being Latin for egg) but, whatever label we give to it, these tiny, tiny eggs, once fertilised, give our kaleidoscope world its saints and sinners. Little thought is given to the how and why when a new baby is born, but those first moments of a child’s life normally produce a sense, in the mother, of having been the bearer of a new order. There has been nothing like this before – this little person is exactly what the world has been needing. Here is the answer to all the questions ever asked.

Offering less potential for world peace is the little tadpole developing from the frog spawn which is floating about in jellied masses in ponds and streams around now. Tiny black dots in the jelly turn into tadpoles after a couple of weeks and then, after about three months, they develop into baby frogs. Few of the tadpoles get that far, however, as many are eaten whilst in the pond. We had a pond in our cottage garden in Lincolnshire and each Spring there would be something of a competition to be the first person to spot the frog spawn. The female frog is capable of laying up to three thousand eggs. Not SO bad then that the infant mortality rate is high. Cutting the grass was always a problem once the little perishers had left the water.

Eggs and Springtime. Easter in Spring. Eggs and Easter. In Scandinavian countries, branches of flowering trees may be brought indoors in advance of Easter so that the little flower buds will open out for Easter Day. My granny used to do that – we have no Scandinavian roots as far as I am aware – except for the “Vikings-got-everywhere” thing. Eggs would be hung on these branches – sometimes hens’ eggs but often today they will be chocolate eggs.

As a child, it was very exciting and special to be given the opportunity to collect hens’ eggs and I don’t remember ever breaking one. Perhaps that is because I didn’t do it very often. It was equally thrilling to find a nest with the greenish-blue speckled eggs of a blackbird. We knew the parent bird would come back if we returned promptly so we didn’t linger, but the image stayed with us and we wondered if the blackbirds singing in the lane the next season had been growing inside those little turquoise gems. We expected to keep them and their own family as neighbours. Eggs and expectations seem to go together so well. This poem points to the new beginning within the egg and the hope which accompanies it :

EGGS AND EXPECTATIONS (Janet Mackintosh Cayley)

Beginning with rarity
Whose advent is the starting point
Of the others’ maturity,
This genesis gives form to the infant dawn
When a new nucleus
Becomes the source of initiation,
Giving rise to the opening chapter
At the outset of the original voyage.

The commencement of this rudimentary journey
Is marked by a single bud
Which, after its nativity,
Emerges from its spheroidal
To await infancy.
A suckling.
Ripening. Mellowing.
Contemporaneously instituting curiosities.

Suppose the world was originally an egg and the Supreme Being cracked it open to reveal the yolk – life itself and all that is needed to sustain it, and the white – to cushion us when we fall. Now imagine that we are fast using up our yolk – not difficult when we take note of what is happening to this planet. How close can the world come to consuming all of its yolk? What amount of albumen will then be required to bolster us? Where will we find it?

Troubling questions with some frightening answers – and worse – no answers at all. But the human race strives to survive. Fear and uncertainty may set in, yet, as the land warms and the daylight is extended each springtime, we eat our Easter eggs; we roll our hard-boiled eggs down steep hills or, as in America, across the President’s lawn; we make little nests for the Easter hare to fill with eggs and we remember that, two thousand years ago, a few friends of a nobody found that a boulder (symbolised by the egg), which had stoppered his tomb, had been rolled away. He was on their side of the tomb.

RUSSIAN EASTER CAROL

Easter eggs! Easter eggs!
Give to him that begs!
For Christ the Lord is arisen.

To the poor, open door,
something give from your store!
For Christ the Lord is arisen.

Those who hoard, can’t afford -
moth and rust their reward!
For Christ the Lord is arisen.

Those who love freely give -
long and well may they live!
For Christ the Lord is arisen.

Eastertide, like a bride,
comes, and won’t be denied.
For Christ the Lord is arisen.

By: everylittlething

I listen for the geese as they direct each other over our home, from one feeding ground to another. I have tingled when I heard the swifts scream all around me. Winter sounds, summer songs, spring music, autumn calls – they are everywhere. Some grey days, when the world won’t come alive, are menacingly quiet. And then a robin sings. It may be a male, it may be a female – they both sing, often from a hidden spot in a hedge, a bush or a tree. In the springtime – and we are almost there – it is the male who will sing his rich warble to attract a mate. His volume is up and the notes are long and almost plaintive. Later, towards the end of summer, robins seem to disappear for a while. While they are moulting, after breeding, they become a little embarrassed and silent. When autumn comes the robin will begin to sing again so that it can let us know where its winter territories are going to be. The song is quieter than in the springtime though. In his “Songs of Innocence”, William Blake touches on the throbbing song of the little redbreast:

“Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.”

The little poem is entitled “The Blossom” and who hasn’t seen a picture of the robin singing from a spray of apple blossom? Birdsong has such power. Power to lift a soul from its muddy puddle. I cannot understand how a body has no interest in the sound a bird makes when that same body will travel miles to catch said bird on camera. Why do people have tick-lists of birds they have seen when they could stay and listen and thrill to those exquisite notes? I have only seen the cuckoo once but I have heard it many, many times – even as far north as we now are in Caithness. Wordsworth in “To the Cuckoo”, describes that tantalising sound,

“While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.”

My family honour the first call of the cuckoo. It is a rite of passage. When you hear that sound, there is a certainty through Spring into Summer. My grandparents loved it, my mother still loves it, my own generation loves it and my grown-up children are captivated by it. The cuckoo’s loud and monotonous two-syllable call IS Spring. This is the cuckoo’s courtship and will attract a female for the male but, nonetheless, to the human ear, it IS Spring. But back to our little robin. The robin and the wren, whose song is pure thrill, will punctuate a winter’s day with their territorial calls but, as the March days lengthen, the thrush will join in and the blue tits and great tits too. Spring migrants will soon arrive and add their voices. The willow warblers sing without pause to make certain of their territories. Their song is soft and liquid with notes descending. The tune is beautiful.

Birdsong is not limited to the daytime. One of the most memorable sounds of the first part of Spring is the song of the tawny owl. The male and female make the well-known “tu-whit, tu-whoo” sound by calling to each other – a merry note, so says Shakespeare – so it must be! Their song is much pleasanter to the ear than the call of the barn owl which can be pretty scary. It ranges from a hiss to an eerie blood-curdling scream – hence the “screech owl”. We have both here. We sometimes hear the tawnies from our house and the barn owls we spot from the car when we are driving home in the evenings. It was much the same in Lincolnshire. The tawny owls frequented the trees at the bottom of the garden and a great ghost of a barn owl would fly low alongside the car of an evening. Their calls please me. As the cuckoo is symbolic of Spring, so the owl is emblematic of the night – except for the short-eared owl which is an opportunist and hunts in the daytime too. Last year, on a walk, we spotted one flying ahead of us, then stopping, then flying on- rather as a wheatear does. It isn’t classic owl behaviour but that is what happened.

Some twenty years ago, living in a wrecker’s cottage named “Grey Gulls”, we were able to watch and listen to the various gulls sailing the skies of Orkney. Their songs range from the bark of the great black-back to the shrill whistle of the common gull. Now that we are across the Pentland Firth from there, we hear them still. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between the bubbling trill of the curlew and the laughing mew of the herring gull. We hear all of the sounds which the herring gulls make as they are all around us throughout the year. We throw an apple core onto the garden and ZAP! a herring gull is down on it and swallowing it in its entirety. You can even watch it go down the neck of the bird. The mafia of gulls which exists in our neighbourhood contrasts vividly with the solitary thrush in Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush”. Hardy claims hope for the new century in the song of the thrush. He called it a blessed hope which the thrush knew of but the writer did not. It turned out to be a century which brought two conflicts on world scale – but our planet survived and is currently stepping gingerly into a new millenium. While the birds continue to sing, there is hope for all our tomorrows.

Another favourite birdsong is the cooing of the dove. Often, when I am at my desk, I can hear the doves in the trees which fill our square. Perhaps it is because of the part the dove plays in the Christian scriptures, but that sound is such peace, such calm – and clears my fuddled head every time I hear it. They are silvery sweet birds and I am always glad to see them share the birdseed in the garden. Another sound they make, which I consider to be friendly and sociable, is the tuck-tuck-tuck as they pick up the seed which is scattered daily on the roof of my little metal tool shed. I first met the modest dove when we lived near to the village school and the trees surrounding it had cooing doves sharing their secrets with this voyeuristic little girl. I hope there will always be a pair of cooing collared doves close by.

The messages which we call birdsong don’t stop after the breeding season. John Keats, in his very well-known “To Autumn”, was aware of the redbreast whistling from a garden croft and gathering swallows twittering in the skies. At the back end of the year those twittering swallows sit on the wires, which run to and from our home, calling to each other. The sound is particularly lovely as it will likely be the last time we hear from them for a while. Their relative, the house martin, is another twitterer. We shared our first home with a pair of house martins. They would return each year until our children were old enough for boisterous games below the birds’ pitch. We would listen to their chattering and watch them build as they came to and fro with mud for their nest. The sounds of the martins and of our children playing, blend in my memory, transporting me to delightful summers when the returning martins were not as new to parenting as we were. When the children were much older we lived in an old cottage with a roof which was in part supported by a massive tree trunk. The swifts would nest in that roof year after year and wake us with the summer dawn – yet staying up late in the evening. Their families – I am sure there cannot have been only one family – sounded more like rats scurrying about up there than birds. Don’t read Alan Garner’s “The Owl Service” while you have visiting swifts in your attic!

The tiny wrens make excellent parents and the strong family bond is reflected in the way the young of the first brood often help their parents in feeding the next lot of babies. Both sexes sing during courtship and their vocalising is a joy to hear:

“You know I love the wren
Yodelling for me,
Yammering as he defends his den,
Yelling to save his mate -
Yet you will hear his song, then
Yesterdays will be as today.” ( Janet Mackintosh Cayley )

The poor little things are fairly terrified of the jackdaws who come here to join in the breakfast party in our back garden. The jackdaws come in their tens. Their “chack-chack-chack” is enough to frighten the smaller birds and yet, to me, it is an amiable sound, almost as if they are telling me that Jack and Jack and Jack have all arrived and send greetings.

By the end of March, garden bird activity becomes quite intense. As well as our robins, wrens, thrushes and tits, the chaffinches, dunnocks and greenfinches join in the music. Some, you just hear and rarely, if ever, see – like the wee goldcrest. The summer visitors, such as the blackcap and the chiff-chaff, arrive in April. The orchestra expands until, in early June, birdsong is everywhere. How anyone cannot love the passion in each aria, I will never understand. They sing out with everything they can give and then, when light is all around them, they come down to the ground and look for food. It is thought that the song thrush starts off the dawn chorus when it is still dark and the great tits, blackbirds and wrens are also early birds. But they are unable to catch the worm until it is light. Then they tank up and, it seems, they give an encore later in the morning – almost a thank you for the food they have found.

There have been many times when the dawn chorus has seemed to me so beautiful that it has almost made me cry. There are some sounds which make your nose tingle, your eyes fill and simply pick up you breath and run away with it. The dawn chorus is choral singing of the heavenly order. Two of our lovely daughters were born early in the morning – one in Spring and the other in early Summer. They were welcomed into the world by the same celestial choir which will sing us through Spring and into Summer 2013. They sang away the pain of someone dear who had suffered with Motor Neurone Disease. The music is there all our lives through:

“A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those
upright lines? those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are
in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.” (Walt Whitman 1819-92)

By: everylittlething

Babar and Celeste, in a hot air balloon, survey the tiny houses, the field patterns and all of the pieces which make up the everyday patchwork of our lives,

“And there was the sea, the great blue sea,” writes Jean de Brunhoff.

How powerfully can a string of simple words convey a deeply held passion.

“I love you.” “The great blue sea.” Together these convey my own passion for the briny :

“I love you, Great Blue Sea.”

The sea is no small natural ally – although it has some very tiny components. In Great Britain our weather is windy and the seas around us are often shallow. Salt spray can travel a considerable distance inland and change the character of the flora there. Our home, built to accommodate those involved with the herring boom of the early 1800s, is often coated in salt spray – and our car, built to accommodate those involved with 21st century travel, suffers the same treatment. We don’t argue with the sea. If the sea makes a deposit, we accept it. One doesn’t argue with the mighty sea. Many try to contain it – to keep it away from their streets and properties – but one cannot legislate for such immense power. In the recent storm surge of mid-December 2012, the streets around the harbour here were flooded and sandbags kept the water out of most homes, but not all.

“The Kraken” by Alfred Lord Tennyson is sensual in its description of a sea-born power – which will remain until the last days. None of us can ever forget the devastating tsunami, the destructive tidal wave which began in Indonesia and killed or ruined so many in Thailand in 2004. I have seen the trailer for the recent film, “The Impossible” with Ewan MacGregor, and the footage of the approaching wave is monstrous in its paralysing menace. Yet the sea has fed our islands and many more for millenia. Our own small town was well established before the arrival of the massive shoals of herring around our shores but it changed character early in the 19th century. Refugees from the clearances worked in the fishing settlements of Sutherland and Caithness – now my home. Neil Gunn’s book, “The Silver Darlings”, weaves a fictional account of the lives of such as these. Fiction it is – but rich and full of truths to touch even the harder heart. The novel begins with loss and paints with words the portrait of a diaspora from the fertile valleys, forced to survive in an unfamiliar landscape with deprivation and tragedy as their lot.

Yet the herring brought riches to some. If you are in the right place at the right time, the sea might become your friend and benefactor. (The wreckers twisted this type of fate to suit them, lighting fires to lure ships onto the rocks so that the cargoes became loot.) Not only were the silver darlings taken south to Edinburgh and Glasgow but, by 1850, much of the exported herring went to the Continent. The sea is voluptuous in its own seductive and opulent sense. Since time began the fruits of the seas and oceans have been used and valued by the inhabitants of our planet. Kelp has been a source of income in our islands for many years, its ash is useful as a source of iodine. In Orkney a local dessert was made with kelp before Orkney ice-cream became popular. The sea spews out seaweed and offers it to the earth as fertiliser for the coastal farmers to plough into their fields. In Scottish folklore the sea is inhabited by horses which are called kelpies – wonder where that name came from! The kelpie, though appearing as a murderous black horse, may also take the form of a handsome young man. Either way, I shall resist its charms – especially if it appears to be briny. After a recent walk along the shore near our home, I found the piles of bladderwrack and kelp, which had been deposited there in the December storm surge, were fairly intimidating and I could well imagine a snorting, rearing water spirit leaping from such a mound. Definitely not a handsome young man.

As a regular coastal walker, I am acquainted with the inhabitants of the shore – the birds, the insects, the worms and their casts, the fish and the shellfish which become stranded – poor things. I have had many a conversation with the seals and have even seen otters playing at the bottom of an Orkney cliff. Sea and bay watching are so important to me but being on the sea in a boat – well that is magic too. The only time I feel seasick is when I am cooped up inside the boat. On deck, I feel as though the sea breeze and I are taking the same breath, or else harmonising a wheezy sea shanty. The air I breathe then lifts me out of this less-than-perfect body to the heavenly place of which Hiawatha whispered to Longfellow. From the boat, I have seen dolphins daring to keep up and I have marvelled at the antics of the hefty great skua in its attempts to make another bird disgorge its dinner. Once I saw a single great skua attack two gannets at the same time for a fast-food supper. The goose sized gannet is a joy to watch from the boat as it plunges into the water with its wings folded back. “Gannet” may be used as a euphemism for a glutton, but I have never seen such streamlining.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, captures the same maritime experiences of two hundred years on :

“To sea! To sea! the calm is o’er;
The wanton water leaps in sport,
And rattles down the pebbly shore;
The dolphin wheels, the sea-cows snort,
And unseen, Mermaids’ pearly song
Comes bubbling up the weeds among.”

The reference to the mermaids’ song reminds me of an experience when we were travelling across the Pentland Firth one Friday morning en famille – some twenty or so years ago. My young and musical daughters were apt to burst into song at the drop of a hat and, on this occasion, they struck up with “The Mermaid” :

“On Friday morn as we set sail
And our ship not far from the land . . .
. . . .and the raging seas did roar
And the stormy winds did blow . . .”

The looks on the faces of our fellow passengers varied from fond amusement to disgust. Some would no doubt have carried age old superstitions with them. I did feel sorry for those.

There is a marked difference between a sea breeze and a storm. Within a storm, the storm surge which may result is caused by a low pressure system with disastrous potential if the wind is directed to a narrow sea passage. In 1953 a massive storm surge was driven down the North Sea, flooding parts of England and of Holland. There was a total loss of life of 1800 in Holland and 307 in England.

Much more pleasant is the development of the sea breeze. Sunny days warm the land more quickly than the sea and warm air rises over the land and puts out to sea. It comes down over the water, flowing back to the shore as a cool sea breeze. Lovely.

With camera in hand, I have tried to capture the majesty of the sea but it is impossible. How can one combine the sight of a seventh wave with the sound as it hits the shore and the smell of the churning water with its salt taste on the lips? As a child I would take in great sniffs of sea air as my family arrived at the seaside in Yorkshire. I would try to spot the sea before my grandparents :

“I see it! I saw it first!”

and then we would all sing together,

“Oh I do like to be beside the seaside
Oh I do like to be beside the sea . . . ”

As an adult I thrilled at the joy my own children demonstrated as we walked along the shores by our northern homes. Now they are grown, we still share the thrill and the joy, learning more about this enormous force, the sea. I now know that, way back, one line of my ancestors were coastguards.

“I came back,
Not for your bobbing boats in glinting harbour . . .
. . . .And seals,
Slipping in from the warrior sea,
Missing the tine of spume rising free
And skewering cliffs in battle rage.

I came back,
Not for your bizarre uncanny sea stacks.
Nor did I return
For your dunes and sandy bays
And links
From where a ghastly fiery ship
Is seen clear within the wide wave’s dip
When shades and shocking spirits are up.” ( Janet Mackintosh Cayley )

I wasn’t surprised to find coastguards in the family because I love you, Great Blue Sea.

By: everylittlething

Frost matches snow for its ability to purify countryside and town.  Like most people,  I love the snow – the first real snow of the season is a source of great excitement.  Those people who tell you they hate it can just go and suck a snowball.  It is a wondrous garment for the earth to wear.  No less beautiful, however, is the palette of Jack McFrost.  Here, in the north of Britain, a frosty day draws us closer to our North Atlantic neighbours.  In fact, Jack Frost is believed to have originated in Scandinavia.  The Norse god of the winds, Kari, had a son who went by the two names of Jokul, meaning icicle, and Frosti, meaning frost.  In the nineteenth century, when reading material was becoming easily available, Jack Frost was seen in books as a sprightly elf – able to slip under doors, between cracks and through badly fitting window frames.  A couple of winters ago we had fern frost, known as “Jack Frost’s Garden”, on the car and, occasionally, on the attic windows.  The beautiful patterns are impossible to represent in art.  I hadn’t seen such fern-frosted beauty since I was a small child living in an old cottage in North Lincolnshire – when, in severe winters, I had to move out of my very cold bedroom above the wash-house, into my little brother’s cold bedroom above the living room/kitchen/dining room.  Our parents had their bedroom above the “best room” which was only heated at Christmas and so, I suppose, came somewhere in between the other two bedrooms.  In those days Jack Frost was our artist in residence for the winter – he couldn’t resist our wobbly windows.

Other childhood memories of frosty times include the hard-as-iron ruts in the lane which ran past our front door.  They were so hard that, should you take a tumble, you would need a sticking plaster.  I remember well picking our way between the ruts on the journey home from school – noses stinging from the cold, our breath steaming ahead of us, with pale baby blue and pink skies all around  - there is nowhere in Britain can match the all enveloping skies of the Lincolnshire lowlands.  Rudyard Kipling, in “A Fenland Carol”, makes note of the importance of the frost in the year’s cycle:

“Our Lord who did the Ox command
To kneel to Judah’s King,
He binds His frost upon the land
To ripen it for Spring. . . . ”

It is a striking thing to hear the mistle thrush sing his territorial song from the topmost branch of the sycamore when all around him has been bitten by frost and evergreens have a rime of crystals.  Garden visits are rare at this time of the year, other than the daily feeding and watering of our garden birds or perhaps gathering snippings of evergreens for the Christmas table, but it is a treasure hunt to find the bulbs sending up their small spikes of eau de nil and then finding an early snowdrop bud has an excitement all its own.

We still complain when the incidence of colds, flu and tummy bugs increases in a mild winter, sure that a winter of sharp frosts will kill the germs which upset our health. There may well be truth in that – if the suggestion that putting a fluffy toy, bought in a car boot sale, into the domestic freezer overnight, will render it safe for Baby to cuddle, is correct.

When Jack Frost goes on his Mediterranean holidays the citrus farmers are ready for him.  He doesn’t visit often but, if they didn’t set up their gas heaters in readiness, they could potentially lose their crops.  Nearer home, on the River Thames, Frost Fairs were frequently held, when the water froze, between 1607/8 and 1813/14.  When ice appeared on the River Thames after this it was too rough and bumpy but also never freezing as hard as was necessary for games to take place.  So Jack Frost of Norse tales, Father Frost from Russia and the German Old Mother Frost seem to thwart plans to have fun in frosty weather conditions.  They can’t prevent us from enjoying their mischief however.  Thomas Hardy weaves me into his poem “The Darkling Thrush” with the first verse  - although the entire poem of only four stanzas grips the reader and makes a shiver run through the spine.

(verse 1 )

“I leaned upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings from broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.”

On many walks – just after Christmas or early in the New Year, I have leant on a gate or a stile and breathed in deeply while the frost made every part of me tingle with a clean new start.  Rather like the fluffy toy from the car boot sale, I feel as if I have been cleansed and stand ready for action – ready to adopt the new-born year.  Jack McFrost has coaxed me, by his very majesty, to slough off my winter sloth.

In the garden, when the snowdrops, aconites, jasmine and witch-hazel are in flower, Something – greater than you or me – will uncork champagne over the lot, making a sparkling cocktail of it all.  Francis Brett Young put it so simply yet so precisely right :

“The robin on my lawn
He was the first to tell
How, in the frozen dawn,
This miracle befell . . . . .”

If Robert Bridges was right to describe snow has having the ability to make unevenness even, then I will suggest that frost is empowered to paint with magic those familiar sights we so often take for granted.  Here we have a new year to look afresh at every little thing.  I hope that it will be the “Best of Times” .

By: everylittlething

How easy it is to forget the raw hands and wet socks of a snowball fight – to neglect to remind oneself that lying down with sunburnt shoulders is, to say the least, uncomfortable – and how the joy of collecting holly to decorate the house for Christmas is tempered by punctured palms, wrists and fingers.  Those spines are forgotten when the pleasing spray is seen as a symbol of this time of wonder.

The evergreen holly tree will grow up to seventy feet in height and its leaves, which are very tough, are usually green.  We have a variegated green and yellow holly in a corner of our northern garden.  It provides shelter for small creatures and our regular robin spends a good deal of time rummaging underneath it.  Blackbirds, too, like to turn over the leaf litter on the earth below and, earlier in the autumn, we even saw a redstart emerge from the holly corner.

Hollies are a part of everyone’s history.  If each of us associates holly with Christmas, then we must all have made the association from at least one experience.  One Christmas memory I have is of my father bringing in bunches of berried holly which had been given to him by people he came across in his work as a Farm Produce Merchant.  (Incidentally, it was the man of the house who traditionally took in the boughs of holly.)  This was in the days when Christmas gifts – cigars, boxed biscuits, bottles of port, sherry and whisky were offered as tokens of good will in business.  Now they would be considered to be bribes – backhanders.  A prickly subject.

The holly tree is a native of Britain except for Orkney, Shetland and Caithness.  It often grows underneath beech and oak in woodlands.  Holly makes good shelter and grows well in hedges giving those lovely bright berries at the end of the year.

The older trees are not so pretty in shape as the younger ones which look like little chapels.  The red berries will stay on the tree through a mild winter and into the next summer but if February should have a very cold snap, then the fieldfares, or felfers as we called them in the Isle of Axholme, will raid the tree and leave it bereft of its fruit.

At “Hope Cottage” we had some small bushes of different types of holly – I made sure we always kept a holly living in our garden as our eldest daughter is Holly Rose Elizabeth – but one bush which gave me cause for concern was a holly which had no spines and which I planted in our little area of woodland at the bottom of the garden – where the fairies are.  It seemed to do well at first, my hopes were raised and I was sure that the other trees would draw it up at just the right pace.  However, my aim to let the woodland area play host to wildflowers and brambles did the spineless holly a great deal of harm.  It didn’t make any effort to fight back and the rascals of the understorey seemed to be winning when we left there three years ago.  I am determined that, wherever I am, there will always be a holly so I watch our variegated bush closely to ensure no harm comes to it.  A little cutting-back in our first year here seems to have encouraged growth in all the right places.

Mistletoe and holly are THE Christmas berries and, whereas mistletoe generally grows high above the ground and is difficult to get at, holly, which is not so popular with birds, apart, perhaps, from the feral felfers of February, has branches which are easier to reach.  Don’t feel too bad about taking some inside – the birds won’t mind if you share them – the holly berries are not their favourite snack anyway – and you could always remedy any deficiency by putting out rich food scraps from the ample Christmas table.  Cutting holly was very controlled in the past.  One was only supposed to cut it at Christmas, never taking it indoors before Christmas Eve.  It was meant to remain there until Twelfth Night and, by Candlemas at the very latest, every leaf must be removed or the household would host as many goblins as holly leaves remained.

Holly has been connected with magic for a very long time.  Pliny wrote that holly trees about the house prevented sorcery.  After the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Scottish prisoners were taken to the fens to work on drainage schemes.  Many of them worried that the cottages in which they stayed were unprotected from witchcraft so they planted holly trees there.  Yet holly is not absent from Christian festivities.  It was moved deftly across from ancient pagan rites to sit comfortably alongside mistletoe, laurel and rosemary, symbolising, because of its evergreen nature, eternal life.

Hollies can be seen just about anywhere as, should birds be hungry enough to eat them, they will pass through the gut and germinate in surprising places.  It is not only at Christmastide that the holly is of great significance in our countryside.  June is an important month for the holly as that is when the dear little holly blue butterfly tanks up on holly and on ivy as a very hungry caterpillar.  It is an interesting wee thing as it has a seven to nine year population cycle and can sometimes fool us into thinking there has been substantial decline.

When our Holly was a little girl and my Grandma Ivy was still living, I always fancied I would have a Christmas card designed with the two of them together and, inside, I would write:

“The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir.”

But I hadn’t reckoned with mortality.  Time ran out.

The popular carol lists the characteristics of holly which make it so recognisable to us – the lily-white blossom, the blood-red berry, the thorn-sharp prickle and the bark which is “as bitter as any gall”.  In fact there is little or no evidence that holly was used in wood carvings in medieval churches – an interesting thought, as holly was certainly adopted by early Christians.

In the late nineteenth century “May Birching” became obsolete, and a good thing too.  This was the custom of a group of villagers coming together and creeping quietly around their village early on May morning.  They would leave a natural token at the door of those they imagined would benefit from their rhyming hints: thorn was for scorn, briar meant a liar, holly was for folly and there were quite a few others too.  Going back even further, it was believed that holly, along with other plants which represented lightning patterns, sprang from the sacred fire of the sky god, Thor.

It would be useless to deny the symbolic significance of holly – whether it be pagan, Christian or other.  Like all natural allies, it has different associations for each of us.  However, it is a stalwart tree in our islands.  Belief had it that holly was assertive and masculine and that ivy was acquiescent and connected with femininity.  Early peoples saw physical characteristics very much intertwined with the psyche – the inner man was linked with the physical world,  totally and inextricably.  An excellent reason to sense all things with positivity and rationality.  So it is then that snowball fights are great fun – but also cold and wet;  that taking in the sunshine is restful – but over-indulgence is damaging;  and that the house at Christmas is improved with the addition of holly – but heavy-duty gardening gloves are a must.

By: everylittlething

Earlier this month I was delighted to discover that one of my young friends has chosen Violet as the second Christian / given name of her daughter.  ”Vaahlut” as it was spoken locally when I was growing up is such a pretty name when pronounced clearly – “Vi-o-let”.  Even prettier is “Vi-(ee)-o-letta”, as in the wonderful opera by Verdi, “La Traviata”.  The sad character was based on Marie Duplessis who died in 1846, aged 22 years.  The sorrow apparent in the combination of the two themes – love and illness – lends itself to some wonderful music.

There have always been violets in my life – the flowers and the people.  As a young girl, when I attended a Mothering Sunday service at church one year, the gift we were asked to take to our mothers was a neat bunch of tiny violets.  We walked up the aisle to be presented with these sweet symbols of springtime in order to delight our mums.  I also remember being asked to take a posy to a very old lady who lived alone – almost as a recluse – but attended church most Sundays.  There was no one who could please her with a Mother’s Day gift and so she was pleasantly surprised to receive the violets.

Violets are a symbol of constancy and can be seen as decoration on jewellery and tiny china jars made for giving.  The petals of the delicate plant may be used as cake decorations after having been crystallised.  Robert Herrick (1591-1674) had a preference for violets over roses in his poem, “To Violets” -

“You’re the maiden posies
And so graced
To be placed
‘Fore damask roses.”

In the hedgerows the wild violets begin to bloom in March and, by April, are perfuming the banks with their heady scent.  The tiny dog violet is not scented at all.  The family Violaceae provides successful subjects for pressed flower designs.  If you have an ancient family Bible, it is worth looking amongst the pages for a pressed violet – a memento of who knows how many years back?  Should you wish to preserve violets, it is advisable to dry them in a desiccant, ensuring you have taken the blooms with the strongest stems.  A desiccant may be clean, dry sand or ground silica gel crystals.  Sprinkle a layer in the bottom of a biscuit tin, arrange the flowers on top, then cover gently with more desiccant.  Continue until you need to put on the lid.  Leave them for about a week and then, with a fine paint brush, remove traces of the desiccant, storing the violets in layers of tissue.

The scent of violets always reminds me of black-clad old ladies with round rimmed spectacles – not glasses Dear – and just a hint of lace at the throat.  Such appeared to be the uniform of elderly females between and after the world wars.  If they used perfume it was almost always the fragrance of violets.  Yardley still make a perfume with violets if you should like to experiment.  They have updated it so that it is no longer the old ladies’ perfume.  It is very sweet and, perhaps surprisingly, I think it has a light youthfulness about it.

Our lane in th 1950s and early sixties was OUR lane.  It was dry and dusty in summer, muddy after the rain or the thaw and rock hard with frost and ice in the cruel winters.  Across our lane lived a respected family named Gravel who were gifted in many ways.  They were gardeners and the son, Cliffy, was able to create miniature gardens, for the annual agricultural show, which were perfect in every detail.  The matriarch – indeed a venerable old lady – was able to sew anything.  Anyone who sews will tell you that the most difficult garment to make is one which you make from another.  Mrs. Gravel was able to make perfect shirts for little boys from a man’s shirt where the collar and cuffs had worn thin.  She could create wonders.  She was one of the little old ladies in black – was kind, patient, industrious, welcoming and quite a heroine of mine.  Many years after we had left our cottage and I was married with a family of my own, I happened to visit the churchyard in the village where I grew up.  I was surprised to see Mrs. Gravel’s grave and to discover that her first name was Violet.  I don’t suppose children expected old people to have such labels.  They were Mr. or Mrs. – sometimes Miss -Whatevertheywere.

Returning to the cottage in the lane, my mother – another lovely lady – decided to make a garden of the land around us.  She started by planting pansies under the two windows at the front of the house.  As a child , I saw, not just colourful flowers of the viola family, but also dear friends.  Their amazing little heads definitely nodded to me each time I passed and they each had different characteristics. Some were gentle angels, others were bright wee teases and then more were serious and reflective, as though they each had a tale to tell.

Garden pansies can be the result of the crossing between two species of violas.  Today the winter flowering pansies are very popular for pots and other containers.  I have grown pansies from seed as well as buying plants.   I find that, every so often, I need to root out all of the plants as they become sparse and reluctant to flower after a while.  Properly they should be grown as biennials but they will also take to being sown in spring for flowering the same year.  Pansies are simply so cheerful.  I defy anyone to look a pansy in the face and not feel at least the hint of a smile.  It is said that, if you plant your pansies in a heart shape, they are certain to do well.  One of the old-fashioned names for the pansy is “heartsease” and it is quite easy to understand why.

For a very long time I have enjoyed making rag dolls of one type or another.  I started in Primary School when I won a competition with my “Cleopatra”.  I still have the Ladybird books which I bought with my book-token-prize.  I have made dolls with each of my children.  The last doll (except for Christmas presents) was made with the youngest and she is a wonderful lady – both the daughter and the doll.  The doll is the size of a child and has the happiest face with just a hint of mischief.  When it came to naming her we decided on Violet – and Violet she has remained – a smiley mischief.  Sweetness and sauce.  Violet appeared last Christmas as the Ghost of Christmas Present, sitting amongst a wonderful collection of treats gathered as our hamper by Violet’s maker and her two sisters closest to her in age.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), writing his “Lucy” poems, described her as:

“A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.”

Violets do indeed seem to like tucking away their seraph faces but, upon close examination, they seem, conversely, to be friendly flowers.  They run riot in our garden – appearing everywhere – but they are not loved any the less for that.  In fact, they remain an anchor in this changing world – redolent reliability.  Their leaves too deserve a mention – heart-shaped and such a bright and gladsome green.  The entire plant – the big, good-humoured family – impresses an eternal smile beyond the garden border, beyond the hedgerow and certainly beyond Wordsworth’s mossy stone.

Napoleon Bonaparte became known as “Corporal de Violette” as he gave the Empress Josephine a violet each year on their wedding anniversary and, later, promised to return to France with the springtime.  His followers chose the colour violet for adornments and hung up bunches of violets to show their loyalty.  After Waterloo the wearing of violets went the way of the emblems of Scotland after the 1745 Jacobite Uprising.  They were deemed to be subversive.  How could such a paragon of a flower provoke anything but joy and peace – perhaps a little comedy from the saucy pansy – but nothing more inflammatory than a giggle.

By: everylittlething

Growing up in the northern reaches of England’s fen lands, willow has featured in my life from the very beginning. Now, in the northern highlands of Scotland, I see it growing steadfast at the edges of the flow country. Some willows should be classed as shrubs rather than trees – like the osier – but the crack willow may grow up to twenty five metres in height. The osier, the crack willow, the bay willow, the purple willow and the grey willow are all native to Britain and their various catkins delight children and adults when much of Nature is still sleeping.

Because of the stunning appearance of the weeping willow, introduced to Britain in 1692, it is easy to have its image fixed in the mind as a classic illustration of Salix. My parents planted one such in the lawn of our garden and, after a few years, it was impressive – until the furry caterpillars found it. Then it was horrible to see – they covered it – and soon denuded it of its foliage. This is a sad story but a happier one is to follow.

A little while after that we were given, on one Palm Sunday, little crosses made of willow twigs. My mother, on arriving home from church, put hers in water. It started to develop roots and very soon there was quite a root system at the bottom of the jar. She decided to plant it in the garden and it began to grow. Soon after that we moved house. The willow came with us and was planted at the bottom of the new garden and in a corner. It grew and grew and grew – like Topsy. Some years later our children decided that Granny’s tree was good to climb. They did just that. It had become a source of fun as well as – well – a bit of a miracle really.

All of these things happened in the villages of the Isle of Axholme. Now we have all, except for Granny, left the area, but still the willow legacy lives on. I discovered recently that cricket-bat willow is commonly grown in Suffolk and Essex – the current stomping ground of a slender young shoot close to our hearts. The cricket-bat willow is one of the fastest growing trees in all of Britain.

Topsy followed us to Hope Cottage – Topsy in the growth-spurt sense – because we had a self-set willow there, by the garden pond, which grew so big that it had to be cut back in order to let in the light. This, of course, worked in the same way as does pollarding, hence the unwanted bushy growth that followed.

Willows are greedy plants. They cover a much larger underground area than you might imagine, spreading their thirsty roots very quickly. They don’t mind sharing, however, and this makes them good bedfellows in an uncut hedgerow. Here, in the far north of Britain, along our riverbank, willows provide perching places for the teasing sedge warblers and reed buntings. The reed buntings haven’t been here in the Highlands very long, but they seem happily settled, at least for now. Patterns of bird life change in an area; for example, many puffins have recently flitted to the west to breed. So who knows how long the reed buntings will remain? They are, at present, a delight to watch and to listen to through spring and well into summer. Other birds which attach themselves to the willow are the willow tit and the willow warbler. I haven’t seen any willow tits here in northern Scotland but I do know that they are difficult to tell apart from the marsh tit. The willow tit, perhaps oddly, prefers damper areas than does the marsh tit. It will rarely visit gardens whereas the marsh tit sometimes will. More common up here is the willow warbler which, as one would expect from the name, makes a beautiful warbling sound ending in a gentle murmur. They can sometimes appear quite yellowish – especially the young.

Nature walks from my primary school, as a little girl, invariably took in an appreciation of the native willow trees. My brother and his friends had a den in the hollow of an old willow tree. The undergrowth was well trampled so the whole thing was not very secret at all really. I’m not sure what Enid Blyton would have made of it. The tree stood amongst ashes and alders and other willows. They all lined the little road leading to the turbary which, years before, was inhabited by wildfowlers and their families, probably drawing on the healing qualities of the willow to ease their rheumatism. For us ,as children, lots of adventures began there and these remind me of that great adventure film “Willow”. We first watched this film over twenty years ago and we love it even more now. One special person I know included it in a study of theology on film for her degree. Its special effects were ground-breaking but their power pales into insignificance when the interpretation of the central theme – good versus evil – is considered. The powerful battle between the forces of darkness and the belief and hope for a secure future in the sacred child is classic. Completely bewitching.

Willow has long been a sanctifying symbol. As well as the Palm Sunday crosses it was customary in some areas of England – one such being the county of Dorset – to lay willow rods on every seat in church on that day. Some say it is unlucky to cut willow except for on Palm Sunday when it would be blessed in church as protection against disease and thunder and lightning.

There are many stories and associations regarding the willow, some fairly grim, others endearing. For example, if a Yorkshire lass were to throw her shoe at a willow on Easter or New Year’s Night, and it struck the branches, then she would marry within the year. Now girls, I know things are different now but it would be rather fun don’t you think? Willows have seemingly forever been acknowledged as treatment for rheumatism. Modern research vindicates this as it is the salicin in the willow bark which gives the tree its medicinal properties.

William Morris used the willow as inspiration for his designs. Willows grew along the banks of the River Thames where he lived and worked and their pleasing leaves occur in several of his creations. A favourite of mine is the “Tulip and Willow”. This design gave Morris a bit of a headache. He was keen to use indigo but the first printing was the wrong shade for Morris so he struggled to solve this problem – and he did solve it – by making his own dye. The result is calming and subtle. There are more famous Morris designs with willow but “Tulip and Willow” is well worth seeking out.

Creativity and willow appear to go hand in hand. Not only in the visual arts is willow much in evidence, but also in the field of sound. Irish harps are traditionally made of willow wood. More sinisterly though, willow trees were reputed to mumble and mutter as they followed travellers across Exmoor:

“Ellum do grieve,
Oak he do hate,
Willow do walk
If you travels late.”

Personally I would rather consider the work of American poet, Robert Frost, in “Tree At My Window”. I have to say that I have no idea of what type of tree with which he was interacting in this poem but I am put in mind of the lithe willow receptive to his conversation and bending to his will:

“Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongue talking aloud
Could be profound.”

By: everylittlething

Imagine a park for mustelids.  How much freedom, how many fences, might you allow these relentless killers?  Would the weasel be able to live alongside the pine marten?  The ferret and stoat could make good bedfellows – on the other hand – well – who can say?  They are a villainous crew.  We all know that Toad Hall was taken over by weasels, stoats and ferrets.  Feral ferrets add another problem for small mammals.  As if they haven’t enough problems already!  The dainty red squirrel knows to avoid the arboreal pine marten – or become a DAINTY morsel.  La famille Lapin are alert on territory they know to be covered by the stoat – or become rabbit pie.  As for the small mammals, such as mice and voles, their chances are slim when they come up against the murderous weasel.

It was not by accident that a favourite television series for children in the fifties and early sixties – “Rag, Tag and Bobtail” – was not to include the mustelids as stars.  Rag was a hedgehog, Tag was a mouse and Bobtail was a rabbit.  As I remember, it was on television every Thursday – and I loved it. No nasty weasels or stoats triumphing there – but neither were there any lessons to educate young viewers about the predatory world beyond the nursery.  ”Watch with Mother”, of which “Rag, Tag and Bobtail” was a part, celebrated the sweetness of life, giving no clue to as to what was out there in terms of cruelty and ferocity.  A good thing or a bad thing?  Weasels, stoats, ferrets and, more recently, pine martens, have, none the less, featured in my own life.

Versatility is a key pointer in the success of the mustelids.  On local radio, “Highlands and Islands”, we get stories about pine martens raiding dustbins in the colder periods of our winters.  This ties in with the ability for the entire group to survive on nuts, berries and insects – sometimes with honey for dessert – when they are unable to obtain their live prey.  On a visit to the Highland Wildlife Park, at the weekend, I watched a pine marten in a cage – and wept inwardly for it.  The park has a wonderful ethos of preservation and conservation but that individual little climber wanted to be leaping around the coniferous forests through the soft Scottish nights.  His creamy throat and chest shone beneath a warm brown wrap.  How offended was one member of our group when I dared to suggest that he looked very like a ferret!  It didn’t look too much like a ferret of course – that was my mischief.  The pine marten is of a similar size to the domestic cat.  One theory is that various mustelids were kept in the Bronze Age, instead of cats, in order to keep down the pesky rodents.  That would appear to be a redeeming feature.  It is true, they will kill for the sake of killing, not necessarily because they are hungry, and store their prey, so they are bloodthirsty –  but they are also useful in minimising theft and damage by rodents.

Ferrets have been, at different times in history, popular pets, as they are successful hunters of rabbits and rats.  I used to spot them around Thornton Abbey when I was driving between home and work.  These were probably escapees as a little girl in my class, who lived up the road from the Abbey, showed me her badly hurt hand one day and explained that one of her ferrets had done this to her.  She had clearly forgiven the beast but I still have not – ten years later.  Ferrets remain popular with human beings. Not so long ago we attended a “Festival of the Plough” where a display of ferrets using gymnastic equipment was a crowd-puller.  Crazy little slinkies.  I wanted to remind the onlookers that the ferrets were mutinous in “The Wind in the Willows”.  Never trust them.

Ermine trimmed robes worn with pride by judges and nobles would appear to lift the stoat to a higher level.  In fact, whereas one may “weasel” one’s way out of a situation or be described as “weaselly” should one show signs of slyness or treachery, no such description links with the label “stoat”.  In children’s stories the stoat is rarely as bad as the weasel.  In “Kidnap in Willowbank Wood”,  by Faith Jaques, Stoat passes on information, enabling Fox to kidnap Jenny Squirrel.  Stoat himself is not the kidnapper.  ”Just as bad,” you may claim.  Well, we know that but, as children, we don’t necessarily see things in the same way.  Alison Uttley, in “The Brown Mouse Book”, has Mr. Stoat as the kidnapper of Serena Mouse but he himself is a victim of a wrongly delivered mouse-telegram, inviting him to Serena’s party.  He simply wanted Serena to sing to him.

It is fascinating to consider why the stoat turns white in the northern winters, whereas it is very rare – but apparently not unheard of –  for the weasel to do so.  It is possible that the white coat, because it should reduce radiation of energy, will help the stoat to conserve body heat.  The weasel does much of its hunting underground so it has less need of a white coat.  You and I both know too, that a stoat is difficult to spot in the snowy landscape.

The weasel has been labelled by some as the most vicious killer on the planet.  Now, I wouldn’t know about that – when it comes to wasting innocent lives, mankind is definitely in the running – but weasels are certainly efficient killing machines.  In spite of this however, years ago, when I picked up my brother from his work at a farm in the uppermost reaches of the Fens, I stopped the car abruptly when he told me that he had caught a weasel and that it was currently abiding in his lunch box.  Poor little captive.  It was an either/or – either the weasel was to be released immediately or the pair of them would be finding alternative transport.

Although we have all seen the weasel rippling across the road in front of our vehicle and making that final frantic leap into the ditch or verge, life is not so good for him now as it used to be.  Many roadsides are frequently cut with a flail which reduces the assortment of plant species growing there.  Hunting then is not so good as it once was.

It is hard to believe that the graceful stoat which narrowly missed my wheel may well be on his way to bring down a fully grown hare.  In the Highlands, the capercaillie, a hefty, secretive bird, is very difficult to locate but the pine marten will find it and catch it.  These mustelids are handsome and appealing but they won’t think twice before nipping even you or me.  If you keep chickens you will know that Reynard is not your only reason for fencing them well at night.  Watch the size of your mesh – the agile little stinkers will be through in a jiffy and wreak havoc.

I’m glad the weasels, stoats and ferrets took over Toad Hall – they put caution into my young life then.

So, ballet dancer or brute?  They have delighted me and made me nervous.  Now my daughter wants, one day, to have a reserve for mustelids.  Does she know they are BOTH ballet dancer AND brute?  How many fingers can she spare?

By: everylittlething

Silica has never been top of the list of most-often-written-about subjects for poets. One might argue that quartz, because of its crystalline property, should inspire heavenly thoughts – but it doesn’t seem to do that in great works of literature generally. Perhaps it is because, after feldspars, it is the most abundant mineral. Does familiarity really breed contempt, I wonder? I cannot be contemptuous of the richness in variety and colour of this ghostly beauty. My first recollection of quartz is associated with those carefree school holidays when we would wander down our dusty lane towards the abandoned gatehouse at Burnham Beck. To my brother and to me this was a special place as we knew that our maternal grandmother was brought up there. The lane is no longer dusty and the fields on either side are now equally ornamented hardcore as a housing estate – no surprises there then. However, in those days, this country child found her own gemstones in the beck. They were significant amongst the water cress and wild flowers growing along the water margins. At first, to our childish eyes, they were broken pieces of glass, but interested adults pointed us in the direction of our research. To me they were as beautiful as jewels – natural gifts which gave as much joy as a diamond necklace would have given to Elizabeth Taylor.

Quartz has fascinated me since then. On Steep Hill in Lincoln and wherever else I have come across little shops displaying rocks and minerals, my eye is always drawn to the varieties of quartz. They almost speak – certainly communicate – a permanence to me. There are few things which convey the same sense of forever.

When we had been married for only a short time, my husband presented me with a piece of quartz, hoping to further my geological education. He failed. I treasure that cool and almost transparent rock but I find it difficult to see beyond it when it comes to minerals. I am able to look to the side and learn more about quartz and its varieties but I am so much in thrall to it that my geological knowledge, outwith its sphere, is limited. Admitting defeat perhaps, later, my lovely man gave me a stunning piece of translucent rose quartz – the pink of which is exquisite. I defy anyone to find a more delicate and yet more powerful shade. Cool, yet on fire with kindly light.

We have too, a large, clear piece of quartz on display – quite a stunner – which I purchased for the man’s Christmas present from a most unlikely place. Certainly the retailer can have had no idea of its value or I wouldn’t have been able to buy it.

Flint arrowheads have fired the imagination of young children from time immemorial. We would shriek with excitement whenever the spade turned up one of these lethal nodules and try to imagine – and sometimes emulate – how they were crafted to form weapons. In days gone by – long gone by – the ancient peoples believed that quartz was very deep frozen ice which was beyond the stage of remelting. Quartz has had uses for man for thousands of years but often as decorative items. In the late 1960′s onyx enjoyed renewed popularity and my grandparents bought a standard lamp with onyx in its stem and also a cigarette lighter with a base made from onyx. They were simply doing the Roman thing. Pliny described remarkable vessels carved from onyx and cornelian in Ancient Rome. They must have been a treat for the Roman eye.

Amethyst, with its stunning violet-purple transparent appearance is another quartz and one treasured by our would-have-been palaeontologist daughter since she received a piece as a gift from her friend’s family when they took her to the Orkney Rock and Fossil Museum in Burray as a little girl. You can imagine how delectable the amethyst and rose quartz appear as they are united in display.

In a corner of a window we have a stone which has been cut and the flat surface polished. This is a potato stone – agate – a finely banded quartz often disguising itself as a potato. We also have, near to it, a “potato”, or rather an uncut potato stone, never having displayed its beauties to man. It is priceless as it was given to us by my father shortly before he died. He was so intrigued by our agate that he set out to find a partner for it. So now we have the whole story – the secret of stones – the uncut as well as the cut and polished version.

Today I may go for a walk along “my” beach and there is a very good chance that I will find a specimen of quartz. They crop up all through my life. I would never be able to keep them all – nor should I. It doesnt matter how man fashions this amazing mineral, craftsmanship is secondary to the “krystallos” of Pliny. We all have clocks and watches which keep time because of the inclusion of quartz in their manufacture. It is well-known that quartz is used to make glass and porcelain. But the real ingenuity is in the formation of this true international – a cool beauty found in its various guises across the globe. Timeless treasure.

By: everylittlething

Every so often we meet with a familiar part of our environment which we suppose has some personal attachment for us as individuals. Over the next year I am hoping to share some of my familiars. I can’t say why a flower, for example, rings the same bell as sharing a sentiment with another human being. It does, however, and one of those words which conjures up images from across my own span is “yarrow”. We can never be sure how far back our associations go but my earliest memory of yarrow takes me to a dusty lane on the edge of a Lincolnshire village. We lived in an old cottage – no hot water, no bathroom – the loo was in the yard, only a coal fire for warmth. We had to put pegged rugs from the floor onto our beds in the coldest winters and, as my own bedroom was, in effect, over a barn, I moved in with my younger brother when the cold was keen.

But the summers were long and blissful – mostly. There was nothing to stop me from wandering the lanes and hedgerows around our home. No traffic, except the occasional wooden farm cart, adapted so that it might be pulled by a chugging grey tractor instead of the traditional cart horse, sadly gone before my time. Neither was there the same fear, as now, of abduction.

Along the lanes of my childhood grew the strong smelling yarrow. It has been respected for thousands of years because of its property as a stem to bleeding. The French call it “herbe aux charpentiers” as it is said to cure all wounds caused by sharp edged tools. It is believed that Achilles used it for his soldiers’ wounds in the Trojan War. The First Nations of America used it for the same reason.

Sometimes yarrow is referred to as “milfoil” – which means “a thousand leaves”. I suppose this is because its leaves are divided into tiny segments. It grows about thirty centimetres in height, sometimes it grows taller, and is usually white but there is a pink variation too. The plant comes year after year and will often flower late into the autumn if the conditions are right.

It is such a pretty feathery plant and I love it still as I did when I would cup my hands around it as a child. There are some odd sayings associated with yarrow. One of the less romantic is the old Suffolk rhyme:

Green yarrow, green yarrow, you bears a white blow,
If my love loves me, my nose will bleed now!

If yarrow was put into the nose, it would cause it to bleed and it was believed that relief from migraine might be obtained in this way.

Dusty summers in our lanes changed the rich green leaves into grey-green lace which amply framed the tiny white florets. The Irish believed that good luck would ensue if the yarrow was sewn into clothing and cushions were filled with it in the eastern counties of England. Even in the last century, yarrow was still believed to prevent the efficacy of spells and to be itself a charm against sickness. It was a strong growing, reliable friend of a flower to this little girl – not something that would wilt in the heat or be dashed to the ground in the rain. I would nod to it when I went for country walks with my granny and, later, as I grew, I rejoiced when I noticed it continuing to bloom when all the other flowers had shut up shop for the year. It is an always flower. It crops up everywhere and just about any time. And yet it continues to delight me.

When my little boy became a naturalist, at a very young age, yarrow was one of the first plants whose properties he knew by heart. I think the reference to Achilles held a fascination for a small boy – Achillea millefolium is a noble name by any standard.

Years of yarrows marched on like the army of Achilles and, in the garden of another cottage, we set out to grow the pink yarrow. The first time it flowered, it was obviously pink. The next year the flowers were paler – then, the following year, no flowers at all. I made up my mind that white was right for yarrow and, if a plant should issue pink flowers, well, that would be pleasant but I would wait and see what turns up.

More recently I have discovered other yarrows and, although beautiful and often quite rare wildflowers grow there beside Achillea millefolium,the “thousand leaf”, with its burgeoning greenery, is there to lift my heart yet. This other “Yarrows” is an area of moorland, often very wet underfoot in places, between Wick and Lybster. It is just a wee drive from our present home and a fascinating walk, taking you first past a broch, previously a defensive tower dating from 200BC to 200AD. The walls of the broch are hollow and contained a small guard cell to protect the entrance as well as stairs to the upper storeys. The broch is partly flooded because the level of “Loch of Yarrows” has been raised artificially. The area in and around the broch is peppered with wildflowers according to the season. Walking along the archaeological trail towards some hut circles you will see yarrow – Achilles’ helpful herb – growing where it is able. The walk begins at South Yarrows Farm and takes in, as well as the broch and faint hut circles, several burial cairns, the remains of the ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort and wide views across much of Caithness.

The name of this latter “Yarrow” does not refer to the plant, however, although it does grow in places along the trail. It actually comes from “yar – howe”, in the Norse, which means ” mound of the fish traps”. I really don’t mind. Yarrow is, to me, a familiar which has bloomed alongside me through all the years of my life. Now I have found another yarrow – an interesting ruin – now that’s familiar.