Nature Notes
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Nature Notes
A Raven in Snow. Our house is an island in the mud. Our plank drawbridge to the lane falls short. And then, at last, it snows. We wake to a white and would-be silent world, were it not for the wind ghosting eerily through the house in its unsettling northiness. We rush out to feed […]
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Nature Notes
Wild Writing. Three lovely women join me for a Wild Writing Workshop at BBOWT’s Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre. We discuss ‘the new nature writing’, its ancient roots and tradition; its resurgence and the reasons (and need) for it. And we try to define something that, in its wild essence, defies catagorisation. But we come up […]
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Nature Notes
Earthstars and Peacocks. The belt of trees between the down and the arable field is protected from both the hedgecutter and spray drift by a wide, conservation strip. The grass is long and pale, full of spiders, beetles, bugs, moths, butterfly eggs, mice and voles and – as I walk its length – about a […]
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Nature Notes
Red Ophelia, Part II. The days prior had been a kind of portent. Something in the wind. The weather got stranger, the clouds took on an unusual quality. The sepia air darkened. There were ‘rain gods’ walking the downs – those great, broad brushstrokes of cloudbursts that finger down from the sky, obliterating their portion […]
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Nature Notes
Presentiment of a Red Sun. Part I. The wood is under a sepia spell. Everything tinged, foxed and coloured like an old map of itself. Mid-October, yet warm enough for July. The late harvest moon was spectacular when it rose, coloured like a honeysuckle bloom off the horizon. The atmosphere in the wood is strange. […]
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Nature Notes
The Wild Other. ‘Between the laundry and fetching the kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life’. This quote from writer and poet Kathleen Jamie, orbits my more reflective, mindful moments. Especially when I find myself in, when I’d perhaps rather be out. It’s a wry reminder and a comfort that actually, this is […]
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Nature Notes
A Common Playground. I did a lot of my growing up on Greenham Common. A place William Cobbett (farmer, journalist, champion of the rural poor) described in 1830 as ‘a villainous tract of rascally heath’; and Victor Bonham-Carter (farmer, author, publisher) as ‘a mighty wilderness … threaded by a single dust road’, seventy years later. […]
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Nature Notes
Dust Devil, Raven Devil. A green woodpecker rolls and dips through the lower air like a paper plane folded from a page of colour supplement. His ‘yaffle’ laugh is slowed-down and languorous. He seem to wear spring’s colours in that season – all lime, lemon and sunlight-through-beech-leaves, but now, those same colours are of the […]
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Nature Notes
Harvest, home. Patchy holiday weather, patchy harvest weather. The two go hand in hand of course – harvest and a holiday from school – a relic from when everyone was needed in the fields. We rush out to pull the washing in as the combine roars into the field as if it were on fire. […]
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Nature Notes
Seams, ridges, holes, pellets. In the park by the footpath, two big old ash trees are felled. They dropped branches in storms and sometimes, on still, benign days. I inspect their prone forms, paying my respects, investigating a canopy I wouldn’t normally have access to. Their deep grooved trunks and branches supported lichens and insects, […]