The Mad Garden of Beltane

Every year, I’m gobsmacked at my own ability to be gobsmacked by how much blossom can fit on one tree in our garden.  The cherry tree has a mad two weeks of frothing up with blossom that looks very heavy, but when touched are tiny and thinner than those filaments between feathers.  I’m also amazed at how quickly it all comes down and creates a huge sludgy mess on the earth.  Fluffhead will be very happy if Stanley comes outside and picks up a giant stick (from all that wind a month or so back), and waves it about in the branches, creating yet more blossom fall.  He’ll dance underneath and roar back through and round.  We get exhausted watching him even as we grin.

How Fluffhead will then spend another two weeks determinedly making ‘mixtures’.  These are: half a child’s shiny yellow bucket of water; a lot of handfuls of earth (‘dirt’ he disrespectfully calls it – what do they teach them at school these days?!); lots of gunked up blossom complete with dead bugs; a big ‘stirry stick’ and…there you have it: Blossom Mud.  It gets poured over the path (“Poppet!  How many times have I told you not to do that?! Gordon Bennet!” – read: trying not to swear).  Poured at the base of the other blossoming tree (which is my fault ‘cos I said it would give it a drink and I just wanted him to stop pouring mud on the path).  And sometimes, poured over my boots with an angelic smile, accompanied by saying “I do nosssing!  I do nossssing!”(I shan’t quote my swearing).

He’s learning the names of all the flowers in the garden, from the Nigella (Love in a Mist), the borage, forget me nots, their relative the evergreen alkanet – that has gone crazy and taken over the garden this year, the daisies, dandelions, buttercups, meadow saxifrage, bluebells, early roses, lavender and periwinkle.  All those yellows and vivid purpley blues, pale whites, the colours of a season about to go haywire. Deep and hairy greens on the leaves of the alkanet; massive tubular roots.  Stanley has injuries trying to hoe them out of the ground.

I’ve said before, I find the energy of Beltane scary and I’m wary of it – its wild.  After all that dead feeling of winter, the ferocious need to just stay warm, just keep going, and the way the spring took so long to break over us, ever teasing with rain…and then this.  The grass shoots up in a week and a half, taking a quiet garden to mad swaying rustling mini jungle.  Fluffhead runs through, throwing himself down and down and rolling through the waves of grass, giggling a bit madly.  “Run mama, run!” he yells, tearing about, after months sitting concentratedly on the floor doing jigsaws and making huge long lines of cars.  He throws his arms around the bases of the fir trees, hugging them as I have hippily taught him to do, yelling at them – “Morning!  Morning!” before taking off again. 

I stumble about, as sleep deprived as ever, and getting over a three week double virus and the antibiotic hangover.  Everything seems so bright and vivid.  The hugely bright blue sky against the waving groups of trees – everything has become so tall, so suddenly.  I feel short of breath; they have taken my air, or I’m in awe too.  The sudden space of air without rain, grass without mud; ten minutes without a shower. 

I find myself running after him after all – and trailing my hands out to the sides as I pass through the tunnel of washing created by parallel washing lines.  I hear myself whooping and calling to him, and he screeches in joy.  Him, the seagulls overhead, or the woodpigeons.  As we dash back to the fir trees, a whole load of dead leaf stuff from above suddenly showers over us, making us cry out and leap away.  When we look up we see a pair of squirrels chasing each other as if it’s more than just a game.  There’s a chittering intense feeling about the whole scene.  Birds call and squawk from multiple points; I look about and can’t see them, but I can hear them all crying, quickly quickly quickly.  This is no place to sit down and have a quiet picnic or read a book.  This is a garden to run at a pelt through and pull down the washing and rip up mama’a plants.  And pour mud over people’s boots.

This, my friends, is the madness that is Beltane energy.  Take cover or get showered with something messy…roll in the dirt…laugh like you’ve been in a coffin all winter…

And if the wildness of it all becomes a bit much, and you feel like exerting some discipline on the garden – or at least feel like you’re joining in, then here are things you can make and do, with 2 of the flowers in my garden:

Alkanet, evergreen, and Alkanna Tinctoria

Well, you could go insane trying to think how to get rid of the bugger – it’s a grower unlike anything I’ve seen except bindweed and ground elder.  So you can make like Stanley and injure yourself on the thumb in 3 places, pressing down on the hoe so hard that you hurt yourself and need plasters for a week.  Or…If it turns out you have the other kind of alkanet from us, equally prevalent: Alkanna Tinctoria – then you could dry the roots out, and make a rosy reddish lip balm.  Do you remember the brill TV prog Victorian Farm? 

This is how Ruth Goodman did it in the programme. (In fact, this variety of Alkanet is still used today to make a dye; just as its relative, Asian Alkanet is, in Pakistan – except the flowers there are yellow and make a bright yellow dye instead.)

Try this recipe, a variation on Ruth Goodman’s taken from the very interesting blog, see exact reference: http://kitchenherbwife.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/herbal-gifts.html

Rosebud Lips Balm
225ml (9floz) Calendua Oil
3 Tablespoons Jojoba Oil
45g (1½ oz) Dried Alkanet Root
30g (1oz) Beeswax
12 Drops Rose Essential Oil (optional)
Method - Gently heat both oils in the top of a double boiler for about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the alkanet root and steep for around 30 minutes, to extract the colour from the root.
Strain the root from the oils through a muslin cloth. Return the oils to the double boiler with the beeswax. Once this has melted, remove from the heat and add the rose essential oil drop by drop. Pour into small sterilised pots or jars. Allow to cool thoroughly before putting the lids on.

Dandelions

–        why did you never think of making bread with them?  It just did not occur, did it?!  But it’s doable…and apparently lovely.

Dandelion bread, a recipe I found while reading a blog I pop into sometimes, see again, your exact ref here - http://kitchenlabproject.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/dandelion-bread-for-dandy-spring.html, and this one has the recipe in both English and US measurements, which is most useful:

25g dandelion petals, about 1 cup's worth (from about 40 flowers)
120g (1 cup) AP flour
120g (1 cup) wholemeal flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
60ml (1/4 cup) sunflower oil
60ml (1/4 cup) golden syrup
1 egg
230 ml (just under 1 cup) milk
120 ml (1/2 cup) buttermilk

juice of 1 lemon
150g icing sugar (confectioner's sugar)

Preheat oven to 200C/400F.  Line a normal-sized loaf tin with baking paper, and grease or butter exposed sides (the short ends).

Combine dandelion petals, flours, salt and baking powder in a small bowl.

In separate larger bowl, whisk together sunflower oil, golden syrup, egg, milk & buttermilk.  Add dry ingredients using a spoon (a mixer won't be helpful here because of the petals) until just incorporated.  Pour into loaf tin and bake until a toothpick comes out clean - it may take anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes or onward, depending on your oven.

Leave to cool for 10 minutes in the tin, then remove from tin to cool completely.

Whisk together lemon juice and icing sugar until smooth.  Brush liberally onto top of loaf - and get the sides, too, for maximum prettiness.  

= all credit for above recipe, as said, to 'Kitchen Lab', a great blog for cooking with what you find about the place.

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And until next time - here's the bluebells...several seconds before they were hidden, triumphantly, by the ever nurturing Blossom Mud of Fluffhead!