Blog
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Nature Notes
The Green Fuse. With what Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, Spring advances anyway. Two swallows zip through the farmyard and are gone, to some remembered beacon further north, snipping up the air as they go. A small dust-devil whips-up behind them, as if, for all the world,
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Nature Notes
A Lucozade-Brightness, and the Nature at Hand. Suddenly, our galloping lives, or even our quietly walking lives, have come up against a fence. We weave from foot to foot, like restless horses at a stable door. We feel at a loss, part-paralysed, cut off, anxious and adrift or, for many others, are working as if
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Nature Notes
The Moon and the Goshawk. These are strange and unsettling times for us all. I head for the high tops, to clear my head with a clearing storm. I can see it coming; great grey brush strokes drawn down with a broad sweep over the wet page of a lemon-yellow sky. I decide to cross
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Nature Notes
Alleluias and Storms. Turning the key in the lock before work, the notes of a bird dropped faintly through the cloud and stopped me in my tracks, the way a much-loved song suddenly connects above the noisy hubbub of a café, when you hadn’t been aware of any music playing. I froze, head cocked to
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Nature Notes
Weather. Station. Strange and unsettling to wait so late into Winter before the first hard frost occurs. And in this mild, wet year, it comes as a relief; beautiful and normal in abnormal times. Because, everywhere is sinking into mud: fenceposts rotting, flints rising to the surface to lacerate boot soles and dog paws. The
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Nature Notes
Black Bryony and the Jaggy Creel. Dawn, and a mist rises from the lake by the big house, and a small cloud inversion hovers over the source of the River Enborne. It lifts and mingles with a plume of smoke from the biomass wood boiler, and all is caught in the most ethereal, golden light
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Nature Notes
Helvella crispa and the White Fog. There are a few surprises down the old holloway. The fog came down this morning after a brief, warming sunrise, thickened and settled. I cannot see the hill. On these barely-gets-light days the earth is a painting. The ground I walk on is a chaotic mandala of leaves in
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Nature Notes.
Old Gods & Raven Calls. These winter days, we become crepuscular. Sometimes it feels that, outside, only the glow from big round hazel leaves, or the gold flare from a little quince tree in the hedge, with its hard, yellow-green fruits, provides the only natural light. Like a stored memory; a facsimile of sunshine, a
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Nature Notes
Owls & Flowers. These last five weeks, I have been seeking solace in the countryside around me. The golden light & air of September so soft, I could wrap it around myself. The rain of October falling relentlessly, like some sort of empathy. Noticing small things and wild things has been a great comfort: a