30 days wild

This June the Wildlife Trusts are running a campaign called 30 Days Wild. I decided to join in so that I could spend the month thinking about how to encourage wildlife in the garden. I'm starting by revitalising this blog (four years on!), which had anyway turned into something mostly garden- and nature-focused. It's got a bit of a new look, and a new name, GeraniumCat in the Garden (inspired, huh?).

It won't only be about wildlife - gardening, food and related books are sure to get a look in, local history too, but for June I will try to post at least a picture most days for 30 Days Wild. I may be in Devon for part of the month, too, but that means dogwalking so I'll be out and about.

It seemed a good omen that last night while I was shutting up the chickens and thinking about what I'm going to talk about for 30 days, a tawny owl flew past and there were several brown long-eared bats flitting about. I want to increase the number of plants that are attractive to insects in the garden to encourage both bats and bees. So far, my greatest success is probably in attracting slugs, so I am embracing horticultural fleece with some enthusiasm.

Most importantly, I want to spend some time getting to grips with my new wildflower key. This will be a real challenge, and might be easier if I'm in Devon, because there are so many more wildflowers there than there are in North Northumberland!

NB: GeraniumCat's Bookshelf has also been on hiatus for some time, but I hope to be back there soon.

Buzzard attack!

 

Along with a lot of other people, I have always believed that buzzards won't attack chickens, so it was a considerable shock to find that while I was away recently, my favourite hen, Betty, had been attacked. She's the smallest of our girls, so it was very fortunate that the attempt was unsuccessful, leaving her bloodied and shocked, but basically okay. The girls had been free to wander in the paddock, which they loved, but have now been relegated to their covered run again, unless there is someone out in the garden to keep on eye on them. We were all outside on Sunday, and it was good to see that she's entirely recovered from the experience (or forgotten all about it). That's a very youthful Betty at the front of the picture - she's not at all pretty, but she is very sweet. When they were free to roam she would rush up the paddock to greet anyone who went out there.

A quick Google search suggests that it's not, after all, uncommon for buzzards to look beadily at chickens, but it does seem significant that it happened at the end the winter, with snow having lain for a much longer period than I've seen for years. When we came to live here about 15 years ago, there were no buzzards at all, but now we have quite a large population. We also have plenty of small creatures as a rule, on which they can feed, but this winter the voles were snug under a couple of feet of snow.

Flower of the week - cowslip

Cowslips (primula veris) on the dunes. Not in quite such profusion as last year, but you can see they grow quite thickly in places. Once upon a time, people must have made excellent cowslip wine around here, but I'm glad that we just enjoy them for their beauty now. Some of its old names are Fairy Bells, Paigle (which I've heard it called) and St Peter's Herb, as well as Palsywort because it could cure paralysis, it was thought. I can't find much reference to a Northumbrian name, but a Notes and Queries from 1898 says it was known as cow-stropple (throat). A charming habit was to make cowslip balls from the golden flowers, thus:

Down we sate...to make our cowslip-ball. Everyone knows the process; to nip off the tufts of flowerets just below the top of the stalk, and hang each cluster nicely balanced across a riband, till you have a long string like a garland; and then to press them closely together, and tie them tightly up. We went on very prosperously, considering; as people say of a young lady's drawing, or a Frenchman's English, or a woman's tragedy...To be sure we met with a few accidents. First, Lizzy spoiled nearly all her cowslips by snapping them off too short; so there was a fresh gathering; in the next place May overset my full basket, and sent the blossoms floating, like so many fairy favours, down the brook; then when we were going on pretty steadily, just as we had made a superb wreath and were thinking of tying it together, Lizzy, who held the riband, caught a glimpse of a gorgeous butterfly, all brown and red and purple, and skipping off to pursue the new object, let go her hold; so all our treasures were abroad again. At last, however, by dint of taking a branch of alder as a substitute for Lizzy, and hanging the basket in a pollard-ash, out of sight of May, the cowslip-ball was finished. What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! golden and sweet to satiety! righ to sight, and touch, and smell!
(Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village)

I think you can judge from the description that the grass was thickly carpeted with the golden blooms. I am trying to establish it in our garden, without much success until this year, when I found a seedling flowering in a pot that usually holds a hosta. It is very welcome there, and encourages me to persevere.

Deer in flight

I know that the record numbers of deer in Britain are causing concern, and over the last 10 years I have become aware that, from being a rare sight on my train journeys, I now see them from the train almost every time I travel, and not only in the north. Last week it was dark, so I couldn't look out for them but, on turning the last corner of our track before we reached the cottage, there was a young roe deer in the headlights. We often see them on the edge of the woodland that borders the track, and I may have mentioned here how indignant I was when they trampled my baby cabbages! The necessity for some sort of control does nothing to alter my pleasure on seeing them at close quarters, however.

When I read this poem, I see the hinds poised for flight on the edge of the wood, or ofJapanese paintings.

They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek

THEY flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That are now wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

The Children of Lir

These creatures of the mist are whooper swans - cygnus cygnus - the Children of Lir, and winter visitors from Iceland and Scandinavia. I first saw them in Perthshire when I was eleven or so, when we walked across the hills to see them on Loch Moraig (you can see a photo of them on the loch here). It was a special day, and I fell in love with the romance of the swans on the water, and their wild wailing.

Last weekend, however, it was on a misty loch in the Scottish Borders that I took this picture. Sadly my camera battery was failing, and I was too slow to photograph the group that flew past mere yards away, just as I was too slow some days later when five flew past our kitchen window, honking mournfully. Nearby Berwick is famous for its huge wintering flock of mute swans, and I love to see them, but the whoopers are special, second only to unicorns. Fated to spend 900 years as swans, the Children of Lir were transformed by their stepmother Aoife, but were allowed to retain their human voices when she felt some remorse for her dreadful act:

And the Sons of the Gael used to be coming no less than the Men of Dea to hear them from every part of Ireland, for there never was any music or any delight heard in Ireland to compare with that music of the swans. And they used to be telling stories, and to be talking with men of Ireland every day, and with their teachers and their fellow-pupils and their friends. And every night they used to sing very sweet music of the Sidhe; and every one that heard that music would sleep sound and quiet whatever trouble or long sickness might be on him; for every one that heard the music of the birds, it is happy and contented he would be after it. (Lady Gregory, The Fate of the Children of Lir)

In the Country by Kenneth Allsop

First published in 1972, this book is a collection of essays originally published by Kenneth Allsop in The Daily Mail. Well-known in the UK as a broadcaster, he died a year after the book was published, and is buried in the village he wrote about, Powerstock in Dorset. Throughout the book, for reasons, at the time, of privacy, he uses the names of Hardy’s Wessex (so Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, for instance), a conceit which sits very nicely for bookish readers, who may enjoy the sense of continuation it offers to the Wessex novels.

The book follows the calendar year, from darkest January to Christmas, finishing on a joyous note, and each month is broken up into shorter essays on a variety of subjects. We learn a good deal about Allsop’s ancient restored mill home, the trout in the millrace, the ungrateful doves who only drop in to eat all the corn, and the changing landscape around it. Changing both with the advance of the year, but also with proximity to the 21st century. Yet while Allsop was an ardent conservationist, and a campaigner until his death, his concern is worn lightly in these pages, which convince without haranguing. His love of birds is ever present, as is his passion for the countryside, and no tiny detail is beneath his notice.

This book is about the pleasure and the occasional affectionately-tolerated inconveniences of country life (he suggests that within 25 years it would be possible to rebuild Wessex entirely of corrugated iron), the daily communion with the furred and feathered inhabitants of his home. His joy is shared with the reader through the immediacy of his writing, his detailed description:

The bees aren’t yet fully operational. The sun had prodded an arousing finger down the shrew’s tunnel or through the eiderdown of moss where each had dozed through the frosts [. . .] Above the powdery red cliff which the thrust of the current has gouged into a crescent (and where there is an old kingfisher’s nesting hole – unused, now, for even down here kingfishers are scarce) the bees burnished the air with golden pencillings [. . .] How frail is the thread which sustains them: the few comatose queens nurturing the seed of their kind within their bodies for the long blank months of danger.

Allsop’s troubled life and his uneasy relationship with another of our great nature writers, Henry Williamson – an equally troubled man - are absent from these short pieces, although I think Williamson’s influence shows through the nature writing. And in that sense, this is a slight work, purely an elegy to life in the country, rather than a portrait of its author. But I think I am rather comforted to know that, despite great pain and unhappiness, he found a love of the countryside to be sustaining and a bringer of at least occasional joy. I recommend it as a pleasurable read and an interesting piece of recent country history.

A minor personal sadness is that with this recent re-reading, my 34-year-old paperback copy has fallen apart, and will not be accompanying me on my next trip to the West Country.