Meadow Garden, and Reflections on Beltane

Fluffhead and I are spending whole days outside.  The garden looks amazing.  From a light brown deadness, there is a wildflower meadow.  In the space of a fortnight!  Tiny little violets in a patch under the holly tree.  Beautiful things: you have to get down on your hands and knees to see them properly.  Petals smaller than Fluffhead’s smallest fingernail.  Little clumps of pale blue forget-me-nots in several places in the meadow.

In my usual sudden getting with the swing of things, I have planted many pansies of all colours, and some begonia seedlings in the dug flower bed near the living room window.  It stretches the whole length of the garden, that flowerbed, and I’ve only afforded enough plants so far to progress down a section of about two and a half feet[1].  I put them there so I can see them when I look out, on days where the weather isn’t so good and Fluffhead and I are bouncing off the walls/ pacing like caged leopards, respectively.  So I can see the prettiness outside; and know *I* put it there.  Of course, I haven’t bought any slug pellets (and loads of people have told me to), so the pansies flowers are being decimated with horrible speed.  The begonias with their delicate white heads may not survive the next fortnight.  We’ll have to see.  The violas and saxifrage I planted last year in pots have surprised me by returning – white, yellow and royal purple.  Also getting munched.

But the wildflowers are doing fine, naturally.  The grass moves like water when the wind blows.  Ripples and waves.  It’s got to that perfect meadow height – about the length of my hand from fingertip to wrist.

The cherry blossom tree that dominates the garden (and half of the nice next door neighbour family’s garden too) has finally stopped being half hearted and broken into violent pink blossom in huge tufty handfuls.  It looks gaudy, excessive, and excellent.  When the breeze touches the tree at all, we have pink rain.  The blossoms are always unexpectedly cool to the touch.  Delicious to wipe over your face (as Fluffhead showed me), after a rain shower.

He runs back and forth under the drying clothes on the line, laughing and turning about, pulling at the towels and trousers, much to my annoyance.  Occasionally he gets one item off, and tramples it to the floor in a fit of joy (why?! Tsk!).  He has perpetually muddy wellies because he is determined to water all the wildflowers and the drier patches of earth where the splayed ground hugging weeds grow.  He stomps in great happiness, spraying newly made mud everywhere, necessitating 3 or so changes of trousers a day (and sometimes me too if I don’t step back quick enough).  He tramples little bootprints over any washing he has pulled to the ground (shiny manic eyed grin) and runs away – arms outstretched like an aeroplane’s wings, squealing.

Off under the holly tree, where Stanley has cleared much overgrown and dead hedge from a section underneath the tree at the side.  It’s created a large shady area underneath, tall enough for me to stand up in, that Stanley says is a den for Fluffhead now.  He takes his collections of white feathers, dandelions, and cherry blossoms under the tree and places them all at the foot of the trunk.  There’s a hole there, where Stanley removed an old dead tree trunk.  Fluffhead thinks this hole is his new seat.  I shudder, and wave my arms about, and worry about fox fleas and woodlice and things I don’t know the name of.

But Fluffhead zigzags about regardless, free from the winter living room prison, watering the earth in general, screeching back and forth, trampling through the fresh dug flowerbeds.  He wears Stanley’s leather Australian rain hat – a sort of Stetson, but more CrocodileDundee-ish.  He runs with it till it falls off his head backwards.  Which strikes him as incredibly funny.  He has to go back for it, and throw himself on the ground, face first in the hat.

Sometimes he directs me to sit down too, and plops himself into my lap.  I smell his hair, all warm with sun, and we listen to the birds calling loudly from all sides.  Watch the wind move the leaves and branches.  If we sit long enough, the blue tits and robins and blackbirds will come.  Magpies.  He points his little fingers up at the sky, marking the helicopters and old fashioned looking aeroplanes that go past.

I watch the garden come alive again, and feel the sense of everything pushing through, suddenly in a great hurry, greedy for sun.  I listen to the seagulls, and hug Fluffhead’s small self to my chest as we sit.  He squeezes my arm, and shows me the dinosaurs on his wellies, barely visible through mud.

I see all this, with sun in my eyes.

                                                            *

I’ve never really got into the festival of Beltane.  I don’t know completely why.  I love Imbolc, Ostara, Midsummer, Harvest.  I have a handle on most of the festivals.

Maybe it’s because Beltane feels so chaotic and riotous?  People always bang on about it being a fertility festival, and there’s that sneaky connotation that after Maypoling you’ll be thrown down behind some haywain (observe me confusing my times of the year here!) and there’ll be much SEX.  And straw in hair.  Wenches.  Men in riding boots.  Colin Firth, but not posh, and without noticeable morals.

I think it is that.  It’s the SEX association of Beltane that puts me off.

It’s a strange thing.  One of the things I like best about paganism (as an umbrella term for lots of new and Reconstructionist Earth-based paths), is the comfortableness in your own skin that’s emphasized.  It’s ok to be dressed; it’s ok to be naked.  Love your body, whatever shape, treat it well: it’s the temple, the home, of your essence, your spirit.  Keep it fed and watered, see it moves and stretches enough.  The link between body and mind: care for both and treat with respect.  And you sleep with who you like.  With joyfulness.  You are monogamous; or not.  As long as whoever you are with is on the same page as you, and you hurt no one with lies or evasive misunderstandings.

When I say that – some of my readers will be thinking: Oh!  License to promiscuity!  Disease!  There goes the fabric of society!  Etc!  Fry and Aka Lord Airshaper will be thinking Pornworld made real: everyone up for it all the time: “pizza only ever delivered by handsome teenage delivery boys, to lonely sexy housewives”, as Fry said to me last week in a conversation about this very thing.  That’s a shorthand description.  You see what I mean.

And there’s lots of reasons (which this post isn’t about), why a situation like that, among anyone into it, would be just fine.  Anyone grown up and consenting etc etc etc.  Also, in my experience of people, just as likely to occur among the non-pagan minded.  In my opinion, I applaud Fry and Lord Airshaper’s fevered imaginations, and how for them, Beltane would be a bit of a happy orgy – in their libertarian heads, at any rate.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is only a male dream either – I know at least 3 totally non-pagan women who feel that if Pornworld were real, it would also be brilliant.  Life would be much more honest, less hypocritical, and we’d all have less body hang ups.

This is the festival where non-pagans imagine us all out, bollock naked in the woods or fields, or back gardens even: an infestation of horny ants!  Dancing about and engaging in Sinful Fornication.  For fun!  The shame!  (I am pretty sure there is some envy in with the fear and judgement, of that idea.)

To give my own personal (and obviously limited: I am only one me!) experience of this: I don’t know any orgies at all going on at this time, sorry.  I do know a couple of monogamous couples who will do a ritual of joy for the start of summer that will end up with joyful sex, but that’s not all it’s about, loads of other symbolism too.

For myself, I don’t do promiscuity very well, or even one night stands.  When I get with someone I have the habit of shacking up with them for many years; or having children; or getting married.  I can count my partners with my two hands, less some fingers.  It’s just how I am.  All to do as they wilt.  And harm none, as it goes.

I have a lot of respect, and a bit of fear, for the violence of the growth and fertility energy that starts around Beltane.  It was then in 2009, that Stanley and I decided we would make a Fluffhead (after much prior discussion). I came off 20+ years of the pill.  We had a ritual for blessing and fertility, ending with sex.  On Beltane.

I was absolutely and overwhelmingly knocked up, exactly then, when you count the dates backward from the first scan.  Off the pill for less than a fortnight.  (You should hear Stanley to this day boasting about his SuperSperm. Tsk!)  Considering Stanley is 100% atheist (non-theist, he prefers), anything he does with respect to my personal notions is humouring me.  The point is, he has no investment here – it’s despite him.

So Fluffhead is a Beltane conceived boy.  (And an Imbolc baby, so its Brighid’s job to keep an eye on him, by the by.)  Now, much loved and adored as Fluffhead is, you cannot have failed to notice that I have been informing you since his birth that I haven’t been feeling so very tip-top at all anymore.  (The back, the hormone problems, the IBS, yada yada yada; and Fluffhead has his own health issues too, that have meant endless tiredness for me as he cannot sleep properly at night, though he seems usually fine from it; plus, you know what its like to worry over a child: quite agonizing and shattering for the equilibrium.)

So when Beltane comes now, and I think of all that GROWTH, and PASSION ENERGY sprouting about the place, everyone starting to feel a bit fruity and excited…I always start to feel a bit worried.  I don’t think I’ll ever do a fertility ritual of any kind for anything at Beltane ever again, just in case I don’t phrase it right.  No more pregnancies!  Done now!  Want some SLEEP!

I shall put my slippers on, take up some knitting or somesuch, and leave Beltane and all the happy dancing and leaping to the, er, younger ones.  At least until I’ve had a really good nap.

                                                            *

So this is how I celebrate Beltane now, no ritual: I watch the garden, watch all the flowers springing up.  Count the daisies as they multiply across the grass.  See the sky shine strongly blue, feel the days warm enough to wear a T-shirt for small patches before the shade comes back.

I watch Fluffhead careen up and down, brimming with joy.  Hands to the sky, throwing dandelions over his head.  I catch his eye as they shower down, and he runs over to me and throws me backwards with the force of his hug.  We laugh, and his little body feels so strong and warm.  His top is now too small and the sleeves have crept up his arms.  He grows so strongly.  He picks himself up and runs off again with the outsize green watering can in his hands, slopping with water.

It all grows.  I am with it, helping – I plant seeds of sunflower and sweetpea, tend some small tomato plants. 

I watch the birds and the bees.

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[1] It makes you think how much it must have cost people to have their gardens Groundforced – all those ready to be put in plants.  Remember that programme?  I used to love that, watching the gardens come together so harmoniously (well, sometimes harmoniously!).  Send that goddess Charlie Dimmock into my garden anyday.  But no bloody decking!  I always used to think they covered far too much perfectly good green grass with wood.  Anyway.

The beheaded flowers

Imaginary gardening it is again.  It’s been such a strange summer.  All raining and the flowers have come out far too soon; only to be clogged down and blighted with odd dry patches, it looks like.  Then they shed all their petals under the onslaught of this rain.  Between that and the apparent (so it says on breakfast news, ever that medium of tetchy and apocalyptic information to have with your toast and cereal) invasion of Spanish slugs eating everything in sight…its astonishing I still have flowers of any kind in the garden.

I do though.  I have 2 unidentified Alpine or heathery type plants I bought on reduced from the small florist at the bottom of the hill – one deep pinkish, one white in flower, with small, tiny, perfectly shiny leaves.  This hugs close to the ground, and spreads itself out very very slowly.  I have a small pot of lavender that was decanted into the earth near the living room window.  This so that when I am walking rather dazedly up and down the living room while Fluffhead (known elsewhere, especially to Gitarist und Dichter, as Colin Baker, but this another story) plays with his alligator truck, his wheeled block trays and his combine harvester.  We are in a patch of wheeled vehicle development at the moment.  They must run over everything; and stickers must be stuck on the wheel centres, so he can watch them turn, endlessly. 

Fluffhead has become a real tyrant with the TV and radio, so we endure a more or less constant diet of CeeBeebies  or Radio 4 panel shows (which can get really annoying after a while – there’s only so much Jack Dee you can listen to…I’m not sure why radio is caught up in the 50s/60s still, in some ways, its odd).  So whilst this goes on, at a hopefully restrained volume, I pace up and down.  Trying to hold in all my stomach muscles to support my back, and stop it from pain.  I look out of the front window at the street and the trees all growing higgledy piggledy, with branches and leaves sprouting forth from the bottom of them instead of the tops.  And then out of the back window to the back garden, with the meadow (such was the state of the garden till Thursday last) now shorn.  Apart from those flowers planted near the living room window, there is nothing.  It’s barren. 

I planted a great many seeds at the beginning of Easter; but they didn’t seem to take.  This was before the rain, when we seemed to be having that drought…maybe they dried up; more than they were, I mean.  (I imagine dead sultanas nestled in the Earth.)  I am still woefully ignorant of gardening.  Lots of borage came up repeatedly…other than that…nothing.  I weeded the borage, since I have discovered giving any quarter to it is like asking houseguests to move in forever and ever rent free to eat you out of house and home.   I grew a mass of tangly nasturtiums inside the lean to conservatory, but they didn’t like being replanted outside – they had twined themselves around each other and various other pots on the large shelf to the point where they didn’t really want to leave this arrangement.  I had great trouble repotting them outside.  They fell over, they lurched about, they insisted on dragging their flowers to the bottom, grazing the ground over the edge of the large pots at the front of the house I was trying to rehome them in, to greet the sun each morning and smile at me when I was back from my walks. 

I even managed to wreck some geraniums.  I bought 8 enormously vibrantly pink ones from that small florist – in very good health, and planted 7 of them in those pots outside the front door, with some ivy round their edges, for love of that twining and soft green.  (The other sits proud and happy on the kitchen windowsill, still very vivid.)  Two days of violent rain and they were petal-less.  So I beheaded them, and now the pots are a mass of lighter and darker green, but no flowers. 

This is annoying, and a bit  sad, coupled as it is, with the fact that apart from the nasturtiums, I have only managed to coax up from seed some aubrietia (no flowers on this their first year of life – hopefully next year), and some lavender.  The lavender is interesting.  It has come up so small and gentle, not thick and strong and woody as you so often see it…But both these things (and the remains of the nasturtiums, which I sensibly left indoors, twisted up around everything as they are – and flowering madly too, with blood red, damson plum red and lemon curd yellow heads), are doing well…indoors and pest free.  We’ll see.

All this information in lieu of …what?  Life information?  My health scare is half over.  My cancer tests came back negative.  It took me about 3 days to process this information, as I had got into such a state of high peaked worry I was wound as tight (but not as pretty) as a nasturtium to a sunflower.  But I still have some worrying symptoms and the mad scientists still have little idea what is bugging my guts. So more tests ensue.   Sighs.  I wait to hear what they are and how much they will scare and annoy me.  I had two days of feeling wondrously clear of worry, it gradually fell away from me, or melted, dried like grass after rain…though not without leaving a rot, as this violent rain this summer has done.  I don’t feel quite the same.  We’ll see, we’ll see.

So in the imaginary garden of BlackberryJuniper, which I admit has been sadly neglected of late – as have the Lands in general, as I have been so focussed on this other particular part of my existence…there is a small and disjointed story waiting to be told.  I don’t think it goes anywhere, and I don’t think it has a message or moral of any kind.  It sounds sad, and rather gothy; but perhaps it isn’t.  I think it just is, and just is now, and you shall have it, for that reason alone.

                                                ***

Once upon a timeless place, there was a garden.  A large walled garden, full of sunlight, except toward the far end, where it was a little bit shadier sometimes, from the tree branches hanging low. 

Strewn over what was the altar, over the flat stones, was an image of desolation and beauty in endings…they shone in the noonday sun and then their essence wandered away, their lives cut off, cut short, their stems bruised and sheared.  Their colours faded, their petals curled – golden yellow to beige to tan to brown. 

But now they are graves and soon they will be earth, soon they will be chrysalises, soon they will be parents, suckling round the edges of small shoots, greenly waiting in the earth; soon they will be small shoots, earnest and free of all taint, poking upward.  They grow and sprout, a stem, a leaf, a bough in the scale of flowerkind. 

They do this, the sun moves over them, the moon shines from so high above, and it seems to take an age to get four inches tall; snails wave their antenna slowly as the earth waits and the tiny ladybirds sit on top of the leaves.  Unfurl, the palm of a hand, softly opening.  And finally, the bud, twisted and secretive; the last to allude.  It hides unripe and fresh.  Its colour takes it by surprise and then it is here, before it can control itself it knows the time to seize the worlds is now, and the maiden slowly comes to her feet and stretches wide her arms. 

She mirrors the trees around her, she salutes the sun; she opens, she receives.  She is the brilliant pinky gold of a summer’s morning.  She is innocence with no experience.  She is kissed with one dewdrop, as if we made her up just to be pretty, just to tell a tale.  No one, no one sees this, she is entirely alone but for the insects.  The birds cannot smell her, and won’t until noonday sun. 

But here comes the taller maiden, who sees her own echo in the grass at her feet and takes the scissors.  She strokes the flower, this one perfect sweetness of the whole world and she loves it to her centre, she feels the flower inside herself, and she kisses it softly.  She tastes it.  She takes its stem between the blades as she kisses it.  It knows.  It feels the coldness of the blades, it knows this one salute, this one morning – the way the light falls through the trees, she knows it.  Knows it is the last.  Her petals widen.  She feels the love of the girl.  They are innocence together, in the way different species can occasionally feel each other.  She knows no harm is meant, but that in the cause of love, harm will come.  In her innocence, in her mendedness, she knows to break is her way, is her destiny.  She flowers, she falls.  Inside her budded core, she breathes deep one last time of the sun, of the dew, of the morning and she waits, all upthrust and held out and beautiful in her life in her wondrous morning.  She waits.  She gives of herself.  She gives herself.  The blades, they touch her sides, they hold.

They cut.

She falls.

And so do her friends, further away, all around, all around her, so many colours – the palest of blues, the morning sun’s sister.  The pink of fervent love, the green wildness of a glade somewhere where the unicorn does indeed (oh yes why not) wander.  All her friends fall, with their serrated leaves, their many sided petals.   And all give of themselves, now this morning.  They feel themselves, fractured, being bled; their sad stalks facing the sun.  The sun will cauterise.  The stem will feel the fall, it will bleed out.  Next year, she will rise again, as her mother’s daughter. 

The heads they move away, carried in her white apron, in her basket, in whatever you want.  They move, they wonder, as they breathe the last, at this sensation of movement – of going past.  It is all so fast and so blurry.  They reach the altar stones, they are strewn.  The maiden sits before them on the grass.  She cries.  She cries for what she has done, and she cries for what she thinks she has lost.

(and one day a thousand years ago, my cat Blossom died in a morning, very early, and I crushed that perfect rose I saw in the street as beauty had to be sacrificed as I had Blossom no more)

The maiden cries all the full morning. She leaves.  By nightfall on the third day, the flowers are dead and gone, so far gone they have no memory of ever being there.  Only the altar knows, and has felt a thousand beheaded flowers and more.  They looked lopsided at the world one last time, from funny angles, some upside down, as they died a violent but instructive death.  They watched and they saw.  They saw her innocence being preserved by their own, they did not mind.  They screamed and felt the pain, but they didn’t mind.  It was a long time ago in the small measure that is theirs, that is everyone’s.  They closed their eyes and left their eyes behind. 

Golden yellow becomes beige becomes tan.  The maiden comes back.  He is with her.  The flowers no longer know.  Respectfully, she takes the dried petals and strews them over his head.  She kisses him.  It means something.

Now it is over.  The cycle continues.  Green presses up from below, the mother’s daughters are here again.  Flowers.

And it is possible that the maiden and her man and whatever flowers she birthed lived happily ever after, here on the Lands, at least; where the wild horses run free on the beach with sun in their tails.  It is possible.  The flowers will always bloom and come back. 

And this happens Here too.  Maybe all will be well.  For a while.

Who knows?

Spring

So.  I was going to blog a post last week about Ostara, Alban Eiler, the Spring Equinox – my favourite festival in the entire pagan wheel of the year.  Fluffhead was very sick, so I couldn’t blog anything.  He begins to mend, so here I am again.

Most pagans I have ever spoken to seem to love the whole Samhain, Samhuinn (Halloween), or Litha, Alban Hefin (Midsummer), or Yule, Alban Arthan (before Christmas) best.  But I always loved Ostara best.  Maybe it’s the fact that I am always in a bit of downer in that strange nothingy period between January and May (Imbolc: the festival of lights at the start of February is my second favourite festival).  The fact that everyone is talking about spring while I am still freezing my imaginary bollocks off.   I don’t know.  The fact that of course, Ostara (from Oestre, Nordic goddess who runs fleet of foot over the land, sprouting greenery wherever she places her feet) is shortly afterward followed by that Chocolate Festie we all know as Easter.  Maybe the proximity to chocolate has something to do with it. 

I think it’s likeliest to be the colours: all that pastel pale yellow, the gentle pinks, the baby soft sky blues, gentle sprout of new shooting grass green.  It calms the eye, spreads soft over my yelling brain, and quiets it, for however long.  The images of hares dancing over a flowery meadow, all that stuff about new chicks and eggs and baby lambs…it’s a very fluffy, feathery hopeful period.  It makes me think of sunshine on my head.

I watch the laurel and the other brilliant unidentified tree outside the living room window.  The laurel’s fat leaves remain as ever they are, lush and wide.  The other tree has dropped everything over winter, but within the space of a week has budded and let out tiny new shoots all over itself.  Each day they open a bit more.  Today they are actually tiny leaves, all unfurling like a fist opening, more wrapped inside each one.  There’s going to be blossom or small flowers of some sort too, which I don’t remember  from last year.  I wait to see what colour.  I watch the green against the blue sky.  Yesterday the temperatures were as hot as June, after the endless cold.  (People keep saying what a mild winter it has been, which is really annoying me – I was damn well freezing, and my book room is growing a mouldy damp…as far as I am concerned the wind and the cold were quite sufficient in my little world.)

I change my altar to a pale green, add a small hazel wood pentacle disc, wooden painted statues of rabbits and hares, and a potted hyacinth that has become pinkish, lavenderish.  Small tealights for warmth.  Some sunflower seeds.

Finally I have managed to get the spirituality thing from my resolutions underway.  I was trying to think what can be done in 5 minutes a day that would really and truly make a difference.  Not something brainish (too easy for me to just think about things) – a Doing Thing.  It was so simple. Sit in the garden, no matter the weather, for 5 minutes every day at whatever time I can.  Usually, as soon as Fluffhead begins to sleep, before I start panicking about all the things I have to get done in a tiny timeframe.  Just sit.  Do NOT look at all the things that need going in the garden.  (Do not think of the mowing, the shiteload of weeding, the bulbs and herbs to be planted, the seeds to be germinated, the trees that are growing where according to our rental contract we must not let them be…None of that.)  It’s hard to sit there and not think – ‘blimey this garden is out of control…and I am supposed to be keeping it neat, its part of my job at home here, and it’s a stipulation in the rental contract that I do so…’  But I have been so tired lately, its become easier.  Just go out there, sit in the one plastic garden chair that I have placed far back on the concrete near the living room doors, so I can view the whole garden.  Those three tall and swaying firs.  The prickly pride of the holly, barely moving.  The sycamore chancers shooting up everywhere.  The cherry blossom in bud.  The buddleias that have gone insane and shot up 6 feet this year.  The tiny purple flowers all over the lawn.  I don’t know what they are, but they are truly lovely.

Just that 5 minutes.  The idea is to just watch and listen.  Watch for squirrels, as they do tend to run past, frilling their tails.  The odd (very rare) hedgehog that appears from behind the large woodpile and snuffles its way across the whole garden.  Occasionally a fox, moving low, tail down.  Sometimes the fox is in a bit of a state, a wounded side, or a manky looking bitten tail.  This one runs with a wariness and tautness to danger.  If I even breathe while he is around, he takes off immediately.  I have to be invisible and barely blink.  He runs very close to the back of the wall, as much under the shade of the firs and the hedge behind as he can.  Sometimes a much sleeker and shinier one runs through.  With a small cub.  They are more confident, and look at me, here and there.  The look cannot be properly described.  If that dad fox (I feel it’s the dad, I may be all wrong of course) were a human, then that look says: ‘don’t even think about it, possible food source, this land here is mine’.  It’s piercing, cold and there is pacing striding thought in there, if only I really did understand fox language.  The little one’s look just says, ‘oh!’ in a scattered sort of way, before running on.  They are usually going from the right to the left across the garden, but once they seemed to play chase and ran back and forth about 4 times, while I felt enormously lucky (and a bit irritated that my brain was also engaged in the direst wish to go for a pee, when I wanted my brain to be clear for the wonder of animal interaction).

Sometimes no animals show themselves.  Sometimes I can just hear the birds.  The tiniest birds often make the largest sounds.  The magpies (everywhere around here) fly low over the garden and come and sit on the roof of the outhouse strutting noisily about.  Reminding me of the massive seagulls that sit on my mother’s flat roof down by the sea and can wake her at 4 in the morning.  Sometimes I hear seagulls here, and always I instantly feel a sensation of sunlight and salty sea walks, a sensation of spaciousness and clarity.  If Fluffhead is with me outside at any time of day, he really responds to these particular bird sounds, always raising his hands in an imperious Emperor type pointy gesture at them.  As I say, some days I don’t see them at all.  I just listen to the wind in the trees, and hear them from around the house or the next door’s garden.  I listen to the grass and the leaves move.

I get very annoyed when next door (the neighbour’s I really dislike on the left hand side) are in the garden.  They are one of those families who can’t be anywhere without musical accompaniment.  Always the radio, the boombox, the mobile phone with them.  They do their gardening chores or bounce on their ridiculously large trampoline listening to loud Capital Radio (if it’s the mum), or loud hip-hop, modern so called-R&B (if it’s the teenage daughter). Metal if it’s the son.  I object to the metal the least; I like the energy of it pounding.  It’s the sort of noise you want turned up, so you can be irritated at proper volume; and then ask what was that song called?  The others though…bloody talking on the radio, argh.    And modern so called R&B…whatever.  If they are out there I go away and attempt to come back later.  I want to hear the garden, not them, screeching and playing music that I didn’t even pick!

The other sounds I get uncomfortable listening to is the school nearby.  The sound of that human jungle arises often when I am out there: break time, lunchtime, whichever.  That is the true meaning of screeching, schools.  It’s a weird saturated sound: it’s far enough away that it plays in and out on the wind; but close enough that sometimes I hear individual voices within the cacophony.  Instant flashback of complete alienation in the face of that environment of running about and shrieking and being so intensely pack-ish.  Memories of skulking to the edge, hiding in shade.  (No wonder I always want to hug the wounded fox when I see him; and I never will be able to of course.)  I used to engineer it to get given tasks indoors at breaktimes as often as possible, or tasks in other outside parts of the school, stacking chairs, putting away the outside gym mats etc.  Anything to keep me away from the pack, and let me think, watch and listen in peace.  After all those years, so loooooooooooong now; still I feel the dislocation of those times.  Every time I hear the playground.

So sometimes I try and go away and come back then also.  And then other times, I just sit quietly and try to listen to that too.  It’s far enough away, I say to myself.  It’s gone.  You are here; this is your garden you share with the birds and the creatures, the trees and the grass.  You are safe within these bounds.

I have managed this small and oddly significant spiritual practice for over a month now.  Just watching.  Listening.  Sitting.  Being there.  I miss it when I don’t do it.

It’s made me want to engage more with the garden too.  Though I am not thinking of the chores, I can still see them.  And it’s made me want to care for it so much more – to have a proper relationship with it.  And of course, this season of Ostara, when all wakes up and seeds will begin to grow: this is the time to reintroduce myself to my garden that I let alone all winter as it was Definitely So Cold.

So, today, when I have an amazing 3 hours of babysitting, I am going to stop talking to you now.  I am going to sit in the sun, and be there.  Then I may have a word with the borage and green alkanet, in the Strongest Possible Terms (as in: dudes, you aren’t just being here, you are hogging here, and some of you have got to go, ok?).  I will wave a trowel at them and do terrible things.

Then I will plant some sunflower seeds.  Grow a happy garden, grow a happy me.  Fleet of foot over the land, sending up new shoots wherever I place my feet.  Helping spring.

Imaginary Gardening, Purple Loosestrife and Chervil

This morning

The sun is so strong today.  All the trees branches wave about in the slight breeze.  They look fat and happy and full of light.  I’m feeling a bit bi-located again today.  Except I’m imaginary.  I don’t think where part of me is ever truly existed as I’m visualizing it.  Its part of a cultural myth, from a hundred books, songs, films.

If you look on the OBOD website, here, you’ll see a wonderful colourful depiction of part of where I am in my head today.  I’m outside from that painting of herbal preparation and harvest, but that’s the mood…in the green green garden, watering my plants, snipping off dead bits, collecting herbs in a low brimmed wide basket, made of twisted twigs.  I do actually have that basket; I keep my small garden tools in it.  It was given to me by Stanley’s mother (the world’s best completely not pagan yet so full of credentials she should be pagan woman: she is so countrified and knowledgeable about what everything is, where it grows, what it does, how to cook it and how to be almost completely frugal and self-reliant, she puts me to shame).

Still, in my head, there I am, wearing something simultaneously practical and sensually lovely: a pair of faded cut off jean shorts, so I can feel the earth on my knees and thighs when I sit down in that sun.  A worn old cotton blouse with tiny mother of pearl buttons, blinking in that sun.  Bare feet, so I can twist that cool grass beneath my toes.

In my head, I am tending to my thick and fecund patches of garden Chervil and Purple Loosestrife.  That’s because I have this tea towel (given to me, I now remember, by that Empress, Stanley’s mother), showing lots of herbs grown by the Suffolk Herb people at Monks Farm, in Essex.  I often find myself ruminating while staring at those marvellous drawings of Chervil and Purple Loosestrife, one atop the other. 

You don’t think much about Chervil, I’ll bet you a pound, you don’t. And I bet you a fiver you hardly ever thought of Purple Loosestrife, if you ever heard of it at all. I didn’t, either, before this tea towel (let no one say a tea towel can’t be thought provoking ever again).

Chervil is not renowned, nowadays, as particularly healing, or tasty, or useful.  Its one of those sidelined herbs.  You hear much more palaver about Basil, or Parsley or Sage, don’t you?

Culpepper says Chervil (also known as Anthriscus Cerefolium) is also called Sweet Cicely, or Mirrhis, as folk-based names.  I don’t even really know what it looks like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it growing.  Culpepper says:

The garden Chervil doth at first somewhat resemble Parsley, but after it is better grown, the leaves are much cut in and jagged, resembling hemlock, being a little hairy and of a whitish green colour, sometimes turning reddish in the Summer […]it rises a little above half a foot high, bearing white flowers in spiked tufts, which turn into long and round seeds pointed at the ends, and blackish when they are ripe; of a sweet taste but no smell, though the herb itself smells reasonably well.[1]

Well, there we are.  I’m tending that.  Under the splendid heading ‘Government and Virtues’, Culpepper says chervil can ‘moderately warm the stomach’, and can ‘dissolve congealed or clotted blood in the body, or that which is clotted by bruises, falls, &c.[2]’  I shan’t say what else he said, because people often read these old tracts as ‘quaint’ which Annoys Me.  (Another post, later, will talk positively of Modern Western Herbalism; I just cut out a massive ranty section there).  Modern herbals, such as Bartram’s Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, say chervil can be used to treat high blood pressure and indigestion, as well as having actions as a diuretic and expectorant.  Brilliantly useful, to be taken as a tea, ‘thrice daily’…or the fresh squeezed juice, to be used as a lotion for eczema[3].  What a helpful, nifty little herb I am gardening in my imagination.  (And how much more successful, thus far, than my actual attempts at gardening?!)

What do modern herbals say about Purple Loosestrife, then, as Culpepper says nothing?  The good Jekka McVicar doesn’t forget about Purple Loosestrife, also called Lythrum Salicaria.  It got the ‘lythrum’ part from the Greek, meaning ‘gore’ – it was used by battle doctors to stem bleeding and heal wounds.  It also used to be used for treating diarrhoea and even dysentery.  It also helps to tan leather, with high concentrations of tannin; plus is very useful to beekeepers for wintering colonies of bees: they can collect pollen from it right up till autumn.  It can grow to four feet, with lance shaped leaves and pinkish purple flowers that attract hoverflies and dragonflies as well as plentiful butterflies.  It’s being scientifically researched today for its properties in healing intestinal illnesses[4].  It’s a proper little helper; I feel all wise-woman-ish.  (Its also apparently a bad plant to overrun a wetland area, causing problems with diverting streams and clogging up banks etc; its maligned for this reason in parts of the States.)

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That was all much earlier.  Now its night, and dark; and dinner has been had.  In my imaginary head of earlier, I could have cooked with the chervil.  Mrs Beeton (Stanley’s mother has 2 copies of this, one huge, and one huger) often used it in soups, along with sorrel (another almost forgotten herb). See here, for Cucumber Soup with chervil and sorrel (you have to navigate a fair bit down the page, but it’s all alphabetical, so it’s easy).  You shouldn’t go about the place eating Purple Loosestrife, I have discovered…so don’t try that at home. (Apparently, however, you can use it to attempt to 'calm quarrelsome oxen' by placing it on their yoke...thats the meaning of the 'loosestrife' part of the name...so I hear, from a couple of sources, here's one...)

In my head it’s all time to sleep soon.  Soon Tetchyhead will need putting down (yes, he’s Tetchyhead today); and tomorrow I begin my temporary Saturday job of urchining around the wider area delivering unnecessary missives to uncaring and probably irritated people, for very little money, till I find an office job.  I am assured that my head will be wonderfully uncluttered during these many hours, and I shall of consequence think of much rubbish to write here.  We will see. 

So, night comes to the BlackberryJuniper garden.  Now the night scented stock is blooming; you can just see them from here under the light of the waning moon.  I am wearing a large shawl with long tassels.  The air is cooler now.  'Night.

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[1] Culpepper’s Complete Herbal, by Nicholas Culpepper, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited (1653; 1995), p.65.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Bartram’s Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, by Thomas Bartram, London: Constable & Robinson (1998), p.109.

[4] The New Book of Herbs, by Jekka McVicar, London: Dorling Kindersley (2002), p.187.