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My Spring Nature Table reading...

What with Fiction Uncovered judging (final choices made) and Tinker's Cott preparations, I may not have had as much reading time as usual in recent weeks, but I'm back on it now with Life After Life. This is the much-lauded new novel from Kate Atkinson, short-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and some are saying the word Booker Prize in the same breath.

Now then... has anyone else read it??

I am about 150 pages in and the jury is out here. It's a quandary because I can't quite decide if I am impressed, because there is no doubt the premise is a clever one... but...

Maybe I have just read too much new fiction lately for my own good.

Meanwhile I wouldn't want you to think I had been slacking in the acquisitions department. I have been gradually supplementing the Spring Nature Table reading, some recommended here by you, others that I have read about and realised it would be pointless to borrow from the library...

Hedge Britannia by Hugh Barker

With my new found interest in hedges I was delighted when Bloomsbury very kindly sent a copy of this one...

"Hedge enthusiast Hugh Barker journeyed across Britain to explore its remarkable variety of gardens and hedgerows. He discovered how hedges are among our most ancient monuments, met hedge laying champions and topiary fanatics, and saw the lengths to which some people will go just to annoy the neighbours. Hugh explains how the garden hedge became associated with paradise, why the British army planted a barrier hedge hundreds of miles long in India, and how the notorious enclosures during the Industrial Revolution turned the country upside-down. Informative, revealing and anecdotal, it's a sweeping history of Britain as you've never seen it before."

The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge

Trees are my new most interesting thing after hedges, and every book I pick up seems to acknowledge this book as one of the definitives...

"Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees: How they Live and Why they Matter explores the hidden role of trees in our everyday lives - and how our future survival depends on them.

What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in a forest, they are rarely told.

Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will make everyone fall in love with the trees around them."

Silva - The Tree in Britain by Archie Miles

I decided that I also needed a definitive book on trees as well and came across this one I know not how or why but managed to locate a reasonably priced copy on you-know-where, and I have to say I am really delighted with it. If I have a misgiving it is thatit weighs a ton and many trees must have gone into its production, but I am relieved to see that they did at least come from 'sustainable forests.'

"Silva Britannica is a celebration of trees in Britain, with the focus principally on the native species. It brings together numerous tree-related topics, with chapters concerning their evolution, their sociological, economic and cultural influences on man, the diversity of manifestations within individual species, and the interrelationships between the various species. There is fascinating materials on trees in myth and legend, on the herbal and medicinal uses of trees, on woodland crafts and industries, and on tree planting, conservation and management. Trees and the products of trees touch the lives of everyone. The book sets out to inspire a greater appreciation and understanding of exactly how and why this is so. It is highly readable, full of accurate and scholarly information, and profusely and splendidly illustrated with many hundreds of new photographs and archive illustrations."

The Shining Levels by John Wyatt

Who can resist the Little Toller books?? I certainly can't, and several of you had recommended this one so I caved in and bought it. and here's what the Little Toller website says about it...

"John Wyatt first encountered the Lake District during a boyhood trip to Windermere. He was overwhelmed by the freedom of the landscape and the closeness to nature he felt. It was as if he belonged here, amongst the fells, the crags and the endless horizon. The call to the wild stayed with him, becoming so powerful that one day he did what many only dream of: he left a steady job and his town life to become a forestry worker in a Lakeland wood at Cartmel Fell.

This is one of the finest books ever written on the Lake District. Like Thoreau, John Wyatt embraced the simplicity of living alone in a woodland hut, immersing himself in a life made rich by birdsong, foraging for food the smell of woodsmoke, and the extraordinary companionship of Buck, a young roe deer discovered in the woods."

 

As always I would love to know your thoughts on any of these and of course any new recommends for me to consider...

 

Related articles

On This Day... Roger Deakin

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

'An invasion of light...' ~ Kathleen Jamie

Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt-

This quote from a poem entitled The Dash, from Kathleen Jamie's latest collection The Overhaul reminded me.

I had read Kathleen Jamie's book Sightlines last March. If I was on a desert island Sightlines is one of the books I would want to hand for the way it makes me notice things I never have before, and in there a piece entitled Light also about those February days...

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

It was March and I had missed the day for 2012, but I wrote this on the page...

It has now been confirmed that in 2012 the UK had something like 172 days when more than 1mm of rain fell. We could barely remember a dry day, and Nell and Magnus, now both eight months old, had known no other than wet. Day after day we have traipsed around after muddy paws, Magnus, eighteen years younger and more sprightly than the Dowagers, showing us exactly how high and across what an agile cat can climb. Nell meanwhile acquiring a plimsoll line of mud around her middle and needing a daily hose down before coming back indoors, and our boots likewise hosed off and lined up to dry every day in front of the Aga.

Frankly it has been relentless, and with an energetic puppy to house-train and walk regularly, a very hard winter of work after enjoying those few rare days of summer we had...oh for some dry.

We have been all eyes for those days of Light.

Slowly the evenings draw out and it is possible to walk dogs at 5pm...then 5.30, but still it rained and the sky glowered down on us.

And then suddenly, on February 14th, no sooner wished for than granted..

and we walked to the woods with the sun on our backs and it felt warm... almost hot...

and Magnus spotted it too, eschewing the basket for the sun puddle on his little mat on the kitchen table...

'...and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here.'

I'm sure we still have days of cold and wet to come but have those days arrived your way too...

And if you are in the Southern Hemisphere does something different happen, but still you sense that change... 

 

On This Day... Roger Deakin

The late Roger Deakin, who died far too young in 2006, would have been seventy today, and in his honour we are going to talk hedging, a subject of which Roger would most certainly have approved and on which he most certainly has something to say.

A small group of writers of Roger Deakin's ilk, with their keen eye and astute observations of so much that I hitherto seem scarcely to have noticed, let alone understood more deeply, are proving more influential to my reading than I could ever have imagined. I would place Roger's book Wildwood, which I have finally finished after a six month very slow meander through it, near the top of the list. These books are opening my eyes to what is in front of them and when I read the chapter entitled A New-laid Hedge in Wildwood recently it all chimed... I know of what he speaks...

'I know of nothing more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and a craft that still dominates our agriculture. Even after years of benign neglect, plashed hedges stand as monuments to the best traditions of good husbandry.'

We do love the hedgerows along our lane with a passion, to the point of feeling a little possessive and protective of them, ours is the only house you come to as you drive along that first mile and you will only pass one more by the time you reach the little row of cottages at the other end.

That makes it all ours really doesn't it.

I can't pretend to know much about hedge-laying, or how-to, though I discover there is a National Hedgelaying Society devoted to the preservation of the craft. It's all about keeping the stock in the fields, providing shelter for them and supporting the healthy growth of the hedge, which if left untended will eventually revert to a row of trees.

I do know a little more now thanks to Roger...

'I began at the left-hand end, working along the hedge to my right and laying the cut trees and hazel stems to my left. I cut through each stem as close as possible to the ground with a diagonal stroke of the billhook that severed the stem almost right through, but left the bark and enough connective tissue to allow the sap to flow. Once cut in this way, the stems or trees are called pleachers....'

 

And we screeched the car to a halt driving home from town last week at the sight of this newly laid hedge, a rare sight indeed.

This is winter work to be done when the architecture of the hedge is most clearly visible; labour for a waning moon when the tide of the sap is low apparently. And who knew that there were differing styles of hedge-laying across the country. Sadly our hedges are now the victims of the regular massacre that Roger speaks of. Expediency and a different form of land stewardship and conservation being the main aim, whilst time and labour spent making hedges look nice and traditional would hardly be a priority on a busy farm nowadays. We stay indoors whilst it is being done or risk losing an eye as the branches become lethal shrapnel, jettisoned in all directions, and when we walk out afterwards the lane is a carpet of razor sharp splinters, death to bicycle tyres and the hedge itself a mess of sharp, jagged ends.

All a far cry from the swish of the billhook.

But there has been progress and the cutting is regulated to avoid crucial phases in the life of the hedge, which is resilient and somehow seems to recover quickly, and once done and repaired it has to be said the lane look very neat and tidy from afar. This is how it is looking at the moment, and perhaps thanks in some part to some meticulous hedge-laying many moons ago.

Imagine then, if you will, our horror when the council turned up to do their once a decade resurfacing of 'our' lane a few years ago, and started the project with a massacre of the hedges at the beginning of June when they were looking like this...

...just as the birds were nesting, and the wild flowers were approaching their full glory and would then set seed for the next year ...well we nearly cried, and in the name of all that is Roger Deakin we did our level best.

It was all about having access for the tarmacing machine apparently, and though we made many desperate phone calls to the county highways department, the RSPB and the environment agency... you name it we tried, it was all to no avail.

I suspect Roger would have gone and camped on the steps of the council offices or something.

In fact it was more than a massacre because the contractors were brought in from outside, so not the farmer who usually does the work and does at least understand the nuances of the growth. We watched in despair as the hedge was flailed back to the soil and the foundation stones in places, and started to disintegrate before our eyes; the birds disappeared for the remainder of the summer and we can still see the spots where the hedge has never properly recovered. This being us we did keep on...and on...and on... out of principle and until the council reluctantly sent a solitary worker in for about an hour to rebuild the parts that were collapsing.

But as we walk in the winter, when the skeletons of the hedgerows along our lane and around the fields are laid bare, and seeing through to the bones of the hedge, it is if we are granted a little window onto a visible social history, and easy to spot where the hedge-layers of old may have been at work.

'Very old laid hedges can be works of the hedgers art: a kind of tree jazz, improvised down the generations..' says Roger, and I would most definitely agree. I almost want to sit at this one and play a tune..

 ...and spot the stock peering through at us...

So there you have it, a quick Monday morning session on hedge-laying... bet you weren't expecting that, and here's remembering the inimitable one and only Roger Deakin on his seventieth ...and with much gratitude for my eyes now wide open. 

Any more Roger Deakin fans out there??

 

More Nature Table reading...

As in my recent six month sojourn with The Wild Places, I realise that these books just can't be rushed.

I am currently and variously on a slow read of Wildwood by Roger Deakin, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit and Deep Country - Five Years in the Welsh Hills by Neil Ansell...which reminds me of that poem by Christopher Logue 

To a Friend in Search of Rural Seclusion
                When all else fails,
                    Try Wales. 

So with my thoughts on The Wild Places pending, and those on the other books unlikely to appear any time soon, and with another little queue of similar-themed books in the wings, I thought I would just share the next batch with you in advance. Text is taken from blurbs and websites with some additions of my own, and yet again, you'd be delighted to find any of these under the tree in ....eeeeek... twelve days time.

A Year in the Woods ~ Colin Alford (Penguin) 

My thanks to Carol for this book which I have been saving to start reading at the beginning of a year, and to then follow it month by month through that year. Somehow I missed 2012 so 2013 it will be.

"Colin Alford spends his days lone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbots, the birds and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods.

From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into the damp autumn, we accompany the forest ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being part of the outdoors."

This is the Gamekeeper's life too...the life that, as Kathleen Jamie suggests, is not all 'otters and primroses'. If he takes me out for a drive around the estate he works on I get a real feel for those realities and the hardships too. It is no easy life working with the light, from sunrise until sunset and through every conceivable weather, much of it alone... and I still marvel that from a 50% genetic inheritance that loves her bed, there comes a son who jumps out of his crib every morning as dawn breaks and without fail, and who won't return to it until he is sure all is well with his bit of the outdoors.

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds - The Natural History of an English Village ~ Stephen Moss (Vintage)

"Naturalist and author Stephen Moss lives in one of the longest villages in England - Mark, on the Somerset Levels. This watery wonderland is steeped in history: it is the land of King Arthur, where King Alfred burnt the cakes and where the last battle was fought on English soil.

This ancient country parish, dating from before the Domesday Book, has been reclaimed from the sea over many centuries. Today the landscape bears witness to its eventful past, and is criss-crossed with watery ditches and broad droves, down which livestock was once taken to market. These are now home to a rich selection of resident and visiting wildlife: rooks and roe deer; sparrows and snowdrops; buzzards, badgers and butterflies. Amongst these natural wonders are the 'wild hares and hummingbirds' of the book's title: one of our most iconic mammals, the brown hare; and a scarce and spectacular visitor, the hummingbird hawk-moth.

As the year unfolds, Stephen Moss creates an intimate account of the natural history of his parish. He witnesses the landscape as it passes from deep snow to spring blossom, through the heat haze of summer to the chill winds of autumn; from the first hazel catkins to the swallows returning from Africa; the sounds of the dawn chorus to the nocturnal mysteries of moths.

But this is not simply the story of one small corner of the West Country; it also serves as a microcosm of Britain's wider countryside. At a time of uncertainty - as our landscape and wildlife face some of the greatest changes in recorded history - it reveals the plants and animals that will adapt and thrive, and those that may struggle, and even disappear from our lives.

This is a very personal celebration of why the natural world matters to all of us, wherever we live. Wild Hares and Hummingbirds is nature-writing at its finest, expressed through the natural history of one very special place." 

Well this should be our life too. We have lived on the very edge of the Parish, three miles from the village, for eighteeen years now, but I am interested to see whether there are parallels in my perceptions of life here to that as seen be Stephen Moss.

Beechcombings - The Narrative of Trees ~ Richard Mabey (Vintage)

In 1987, the greatest English storm for three centuries laid flat fifteen million trees across southern England and devastated a nation of tree-lovers. The storm marked a turning point in our perception of trees and a dawning realisation that they have lives of their own, beyond the roles and images we press on them.

In Beechcombings Richard Mabey traces the long history of the beech tree throughout Europe, writing about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. It is an engrossing, exciting, poetical and profound book that will stimulate debate about man's relationship with nature and enchant the reader.

With my focus on 'our' Beechwood and the walking of my own Wild Places I am hoping this will be the perfect book to graft onto (sorry couldn't resist) my reading of Roger Deakin's Wildwood.

Walking Home - Travels With a Troubadour on the Pennine Way ~ Simon Armitage.(Faber)

'In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.

Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.

Walking Home describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.'

I am intrigued to see how a poet imparts his skills to the land of psycho-geography especially in the light of this from Simon Armitage which I chanced upon as I browsed the book...

'...when I swapped social work for poetry, part of the idea was to get out of the office and into the wider world again, to rejoin the adventure. But the sediment has built up. The stodginess of routine has set in. So even if I'm writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic I'm usually doing it in a chair, behind double glazing. The Pennine Way is about getting OUT THERE again. Its about taking the air and clearing my head.'

Winter - Five Windows on the Season ~ Adam Gopnik (Quercus)

'Winter takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists and thinkers who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. We learn how literature heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Offering a kaleidoscopic take on the season, Winter is a homage to an idea of a season and a journey through the modern imagination.'

I like the premise for this one, a series of lectures given by Adam Gopnik, thus pieces that retain the spontaineity of the spoken word, that are 'meant to sound vocal.' and having already made my bookmark selection as this card for its plenteous snow..

I was then really intrigued to see there is a big chunk on the art of Caspar David Friedrich in this book. It was ages before I had spotted the detail beyond the snow, I had missed the crutches, the man presumably beseeching the shrine... that gothic castle, so I clearly have much to find out. 

And if you have any more reading suggestions around similar themes please do add them in comments and perhaps we'll have ourselves another list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silver River: An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty - Tamar Valley Diaries ~ Virginia Spiers & Mary Martin

We have known of the work of Virginia Spiers as a Guardian columnist and her sister, local artist Mary Martin, for many years. Mary's work depicting life and the landscape here in the Tamar Valley is a firm favourite of ours, and whilst we have never quite run to owning an original we do at least have a beautiful framed exhibition poster which we treasure.

The paintings capture the colour and the landscape and the produce, daffodils and apple blossom in profusion and if ever I buy daffodils I always pick enough to create what I call the 'Mary Martin Effect'..twelve bunches seems to come close.

So we were browsing around Launceston after coffee and cake at Jericho's a few months ago when I spotted Silver River An area of outstanding natural beauty - Tamar Valley Diaries from the Guardian by Virginia Spiers with paintings by Mary Martin. It was in the bookshop window and I was in like a shot and out with a copy before Bookhound could even draw breath to say 'Do you want to get that...'

In his introduction, Neil Sinden of the Campaign to Protect Rural England suggests that the book...

'...slowly and sympathetically reveals the many layers of history, culture, people, places, life and wild life that have accumulated over the centuries to make the Tamar Valley such a rich and distinctive locality.'

Now that I have read it I feel doubly proud and priviliged to have lived here for the last eighteen years, and how perfectly all this segued with my reading of Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. But this is my landscape and one which you know by now I have come to love, so it was wonderful to read of Virginia Spiers's love for it too.

Virginia and her sister were brought up on a farm in the Tamar Valley (so really local as opposed to us incomers) and these pieces reflect the knowledge that comes from a true bond since childhood with the area and its traditions. It can be hard for newbies like us to know where the old orchards may have been, or how vital the flower trade was to the area's income, or quite how the flowers and fruit were sent up country, so these pieces also become a vital and informative record of that history.

Incidentally the Gamekeeper drove me around the estate he works on last week and past one of the oldest known orchards in the Tamar Valley. I managed one picture from a lurching Land Rover...

Tamar Valley daffodils from the local market gardens, providing employment for over a thousand people, would be picked one day, and thanks to a good pre-Beeching train network, would be with the merchants at Covent Garden early the next morning. The names are magical and all make me think I should track down some of these varieties if I can and get some authentic planting done... Magnificents, Californias (nothing parochial about Cornish daffs) Ice Follys, White Lions, Fortune, Carlton, Victoria, Lucifer, Double Lent... we have really been slacking with our sack of Who Knows What from the garden centre.

Then there is lambing and late snow, and salmon fishing and mining, and then there is the stinking  'dock dung.'

This was a mixture of nightsoil, street sweepings with horse manure, fish waste and butcher's offal brought up the tidal river by barge to be off-loaded onto horse-drawn carts for its journey to the strawberry fields where it was spread as manure... I'm thinking e coli outbreaks for sure, but I suspect everyone had better immune systems then too.

Plenty of names I recognised and even our own bluebell woods get a mention along with news of little valleys tucked away within bigger valleys all of which I need to go and discover for myself now, and every piece has one of Mary's paintings in glorious technicolur on the opposite page. In these days when books need to proclaim themselves as things of beauty if they are to compete with the ebook market, then this one does itself proud with 200 pages of good quality paper, and printed and bound in Cornwall. 

Robert Macfarlane has this to say about landscapes in The Old Ways...

'We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we re in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in the memory long after they have withdrawn inactuality, and such places - retreated to most often when we are remote from them - are among the most important landscapes we possess.'

And whilst I think he means landscapes of the memory I wonder about the impact of a book like this for any of you, or the impact of a book about where you live for me, and whether it is possible to truly feel that place from the words and the pictures on the page, or even on the screen??

My feeling is that of course I'd love to see and know for real, but when I can't a book feels like a good enough substitute, and I hope occasionally a blog post is too... in the end it is perhaps, as Neil Sinden says about sharing and treasuring the riches we all have on the doorstep in any we can...

'All landscapes and localities have their stories to tell. This book could be an inspiration not just for those with interest in the Tamar Valley but for all who can see comparable richness in places throughout the English countryside that deserve to be valued.

 

Otter Country ~ Miriam Darlington

When I inflicted that garbled post about Terry Nutkins and dolphins on you all I mentioned the restorative feel to Otter Country, and it feels restorative in many ways. Here is a book to take you right back to the basics instincts of man (or in this case woman) ... walking and searching the land. It was a book to restore that sense of nature red in tooth and claw and our place in amongst it all as I scoured the countryside and river banks of the UK in search of the elusive otter with Miriam Darlington.

I had known that otters had become scarce, this in the late 1970s...

'Otters living in an aquatic ecosystem that collected every single poison we humans had ever invented, went blind, or failed to reproduce young, or both. With no reproduction possible, slowly, quietly they began to pass out of existence.'

but had also heard that they might be increasing in numbers again.

As Miriam Darlington suggests, the otter is...

'a barometer for the health of our rivers, and like a spirit level, its reappearance indicates that we are finding our balance with the wild and we should always remember to keep a weather eye upon it.'

Let it be known that Miriam takes a big hit on behalf of the rest of us too, because from the safety of our armchairs that elusive presence is often only indicated by a little pile of otter poo, which we must call spraint. Miriam basically sniffs, prods and dissects her way through what seems like several tons of it in order to track and share those otter moments with her reader, and along the way I also learned that Avon moisturiser is the best midge deterrent known to mankind.

But on a more serious note, I learned a great deal more about the countryside and the threats... the developments that have hindered rather than helped. Countless man-made 'improvements' have been to the otter's detriment, wetlands and bogs have been drained, trees uprooted, all of which has taken its toll on habitats, but nature has renewal and repair within its power, and given the chance and the understanding, restoration of otter-friendly waterways is slowly happening.

The success stories, which often come through true dedication to the cause of otter preservation make heartening and optimistic reading, especially that surrounding the revitalisation of the River Lea as part of the London 2012 Olympic Park project.

Miriam Darlington's travels take her from Devon and the banks of the River Dart, thence to Scotland, the Somerset Levels and all ottery places in between, not forgetting the stream that runs past the Co-Op store in Lampeter

And of course there is the Tarka Trail in North Devon, and perhaps it is Henry Williamson many of us have to thank for that best of introductions to the world of the otter. Cue a dash to the shelves to find my copy of Tarka the Otter, bought with 3/6d of my very hard-earned pocket money in about 1965.

I have re-read a few chapters and I am twelve again, except I can't for the life of me remember how the book made me feel. Perhaps I just couldn't read it because this time I do feel a bit wobbly... thanks to Miriam I know so much more. Dear little baby Tarka and Halcyon the kingfisher and Old Nog the heron...

'This was her first litter, and she was overjoyed when Tarka's lids ungummed, and his eyes peeped upon her, blue and wondering. He was then eleven days old.... after a day of sight-seeing he began to play, tapping her nose with a paw and biting her whiskers...when his eyes had been opened a fortnight, Tarka knew so much that he could crawl as far as a yard away from her...'

But I look at that back cover now... the otter hounds in pursuit and I wonder what I made of that picture when I was twelve. It was a given, otters were hunted to their death by packs of dogs, now it seems horrific and of course it is banned, and I realise I am now far too squidgy to read the book at the moment. It will have to stay as a book read by the twelve-year old me.

I think Nell and Magnus might be the combined causative factor currently at play here. Looking at them it is hard to fathom how anyone could be cruel to anything.

Along the way Miriam Darlington weaves in many other literary references.... Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Wordsworth, Alice Oswald, Daphne du Maurier, Kenneth Grahame, Charles Kingsley as well as the artist Kurt Jackson. Ted Hughes credits Henry Williamson, and repeated readings of Tarka the Otter, for sparking his own interest in wildlife...

'It entered into me and gave shape and words to my world' and put his life 'under an enchantment that lasted for years'.

I had known that Ted Hughes lived in the same part of Devon as Henry Williamson, and that the Poet Laureate, feeling so indebted to the rivers, had asked for his memorial stone to be placed high up on Dartmoor. Permission was granted by Prince Charles (Duchy land) and a large piece of granite was airlifted into place at a secret location, equidistant from the sources of the rivers Teign, Dart, Taw and East Okement.
 
There was great excitement locally when that location was finally discovered. But I didn't know that Henry Willamsons and Ted Hughes had been friends, knowing that gives me a refreshingly new perspective on Ted Hughes too.

There are some lovely touches in this book. My favourite, and often appearing it seems when there has been a sighting of an otter, a little set of prints pad silently across the page as a sort of paragraph break, as if the little creature is there in spirit.


I turned the last page of Otter Country full of admiration for a really god read and for Miriam Darlington and her loving pursuit of one animal. Admiration too for all those people who support the cause of one species... the whales, the dolphins, the tigers and those who fight the corner for the less glamorous ones too. 

But bless the otters, what a lovely book this is.

The Nature Table in June...

Lots of lovely books are arriving for The Nature Table. This week the first three in a new series of reprints from the Collins Nature Library of some of the classics of nature writing, chosen and with introductions written by who other than our new best friend Robert Macfarlane..

This is a going to a very covetable series with linen-bound covers and subtle colouring that sets off a photo perfectly. The first titles are Nature Near London by Richard Jefferies, Adventures Among Birds by W.H.Hudson and A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes. More on these soon.

Also in the postbox, Otter Country- In Search of the Wild Otter by Miriam Darlington to be published by Granta in September.

Miriam Darlington travels around the country from her home in Devon as she tracks the elusive otter, taking in Tarka and Ring of Bright Water lands too, and I just can't wait to read this one.

But plenty of Nature Table on the doorstep as well.

Going away and coming home and everything looks so different, which seems so obvious but never ceases to surprise me, and with an excess of rain soon we won't be able to get in or out of the front door. Yet for all the wet it also feels like a heart-swelling England's Green and Pleasant Land at its fullest and most majestic tilt...

You may recall the apparently  deceased escallonia hedge, well it has now definitely staged a resurrection of miraculous proportions given the network of dead twigs we had looked at for so long, though much of what you can see here might be weeds. We have put it down to those two very hard winters in succession but came very close to grubbing the whole thing up (all hundred or so feet of it) when it was as its most skeletal.

I have Richard Mabey's book Weeds - the Story of Outlaw Plants waiting to be read and I am slightly comforted to read of these 'indomitable, opportunist plants that thrive best where we want them least' because we live alongside them and please the butterflies rather than spend hour after hour pulling them all up. It would be a thankless and frankly hopeless task.

The Forth Bridge painting might be finished (we've seen it, it is)

...we never would be. 

I was listening to Gardener's Question Time the other day and someone was about to blitz his encroaching ground elder problem with spraying. Good luck mate I thought, we'd lose the entire garden if we even tried and all we can hope is that everything else swamps it each year, which actually it does.

We are working towards the National Weed Collection and can't be many species away from taking the honours, but a lot of them are really lovely to look at... how about these Angie Lewin-esque umbrels (which you can just see towering over everything else in the picture of the front garden above)

and the flies seem to adore them, which in turn stops them coming indoors...

But we have had a very different year on the nesting bird front. So used are we to the arrival of the swallows, who quickly scare away the winter birds and make themselves at home for the duration in their nest over the front door, that we weren't prepared for the winter birds' defence of their territory. They had clearly been planning an attacking gambit this year and a combined force of sparrow, wren, blackbird and goldcrest saw off the immigrants and have then all nested harmoniously in very close and peaceful proximity to each other and barely a foot from the front door.

We happened to be home for blackbird fledging day, this one perched right by the door while it thought about lift-off....

Currently we can hear baby sparrows and wrens twittering away gently every time we step out and meanwhile the swallows are staging a bit of a come-back, but to an old nest they seem to be renovating.

We watch and wait but I'll bet the wrens will be having none of it.

Somehow the rabbits seem to know that the Gamekeeper has moved out and taken his weaponry with him, so for the first time since we have lived here we now have rabbits in the garden, and we quite like them as there are only about four. Next week when there are about forty-four we may not be so keen but at least they are helping with the greenery. The baby bunnies are out along the lane by the nursery-load and, as yet, not in the least bit scared of humans.

And lovely pockets of wild honeysuckle along the lane too, the scent is glorious..

And while I have you there...

I'm sure someone will be able to diagnose this gigantic caterpillar, which is probably going to be one of those equally gigantic moths..

 And does anyone know what this flower might be?

It looked for all the world like one of Dame Edna's gladioli but it appeared out of nowhere on the Devon bank out by the gate towards the end of May, and we can't recall ever seeing its like before.

So tell me... what's nature doing over your way??

 

 

More of The Old Ways ...

On this second and more measured walk through Robert Macfarlane's book I am taking my bearings from the subtle little compass points which are different for each chapter, and which I had missed first time round, whilst the series of words which follow seem to be offering me a route, the latitude and longitude of the book, some waymarkers to guide me through what is to come.

Perhaps these are the wordish equivalent of the markers that guided Robert as he took to the treacherous footpath known as the Broomway, vast sand and mud-flats off the Essex coast with a tidal race that will catch the innocent walker unawares. The cockle shells dropped every hundred yards or so to steer him back because the victims buried in the nearby churchyard at Foulness are testament to the risk. If it hadn't been there Wilkie Collins would have had to invent it says Robert, and I immediately got the drift (sorry wrong word) and that sense of gothic eeriness.

The dangers are legendary and well-documented. The mist will descend, the coastal lights will disorientate the mind, the scale and distance will distort the eye and beguile the walker into heading out to sea when they believe they are returning inland, whilst all about the mud waits to suck in another panicky victim.

Well of course Robert negotiates it successfully or no book, but it felt a bit touch and go as he set off with his equally nervous friend David. and with the final words of advice from their absent guide ringing in their ears..

'The Broomway will be there another day, but if you try walking in the mist, you may not be. So if it's misty when you arrive at Wakering Stairs, turn around and go home.'

'It was misty when I arrived at Wakering Stairs...'

and as the pair walked out..

'I'm worried that if I don't make it back in time, the tide will float off with my shoes,' I said to David.

'If we don't make it back in time, the tide will float off with your body, ' he replied unconsolingly. 

It all made me think how risk averse and fear-filled we have necessarily become, because in these days of multi-media we know every single thing that can and does go wrong. Who in their right mind would head out across Morecambe Bay unguided in the wake of the Chinese cockle-pickers tragedy... 

It is very easy for me to wax lyrical about a book like this, I'll buy into any amount of psycho-geography, but as Kathleen Jamie says of nature in her book Sightlines, 

'It's not all primroses and otters...'

and I was mindful that Robert Macfarlane's muse and guiding spirit for this book was Edward Thomas, whose true subjects 'are disconnection, discrepancy and unsettledness', so this is not all pretty, and it is not all cosy and comfortable.

The chapter entitled Limestone seemed almost incongruous, truth be told I was a bit disconcerted to be uprooted from the Highlands of Scotland, where I was having a lovely time in the Gneiss and the Granite and really enjoying the scenery, only to be deposited in Ramallah in Palestine with Robert and his good friend, former human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh. But on second reading that location is assuming far greater significance and has become a pivotal moment in the book for me now...a sort of crossroads on the journey, a path it would very easy not to take, but one which necessarily must be, by someone.

All reminding me of The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost's poem that seemed to urge Edward Thomas on the road to France and perhaps, though this is a different century and a different country, this might be about creating a version of the world that Edward Thomas also faced as he headed into a war zone.

Perhaps this is also about the very different experience of walking whilst exposed to conflict and threat, with the potential for harm, injury and death at the hands of A.N.Other always uppermost in the mind... as several of the word-waymarkers suggest..

'Walking as resistance.... Bullet holes & bullet-casings... Walk, Don't Walk..'

Not everyone has the luxury of walking around green fields with lovely views, so with that walk, which is laden with genuine fear and anxiety, comes a much deeper connection with lives, with history and with the landscape... and Robert Macfarlane may well be in the line-up for the 100m final in a few weeks time, because having felt the fear and done it anyway, I doubt his lightning-speed scramble up that buttress, when he thought he may have been about to be ambushed, could be beaten.

But as Robert Macfarlane says,

'Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It's hard to create a footpath on your own...paths need walking'

so The Old Ways is a book about challenge too, and with multi-dimensional challenges to the reader to engage with the landscape in every direction, not just across and following the signposts, but to think about what lies beneath the feet and what may be over there beyond the horizons of our own vision and experience, and to think about what may have gone before, and to think about what transitory imprint we each leave on those paths too as we add to the sum of millions of years.

And it all feels like a slightly subversive endorsement of my right to roam, of which I am a skilled but slightly lily-livered exponent, living as we do slap-bang in the middle of the very clearly way-marked Tamar Valley Trail. I ignore the signs and wander all over the place here. I shut gates carefully and walk around the edges of fields. I risk-assess for raging bulls, I attempt to coax stray sheep back into the fold and I try not to frighten the horses. If stopped (I never have been)  I would probably take the coward's way out and express surprise whilst apologising profusely for having my map upsidedown, rather than expounding my human rights. Don't get me wrong, Robert is not instigating such action, though he does acknowledge the constraints when writing about footpaths..

'...a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatized world of barbed wire and gates, CCTV cameras and 'No Trespassing' signs.'

When we first moved here eighteen years ago we used to pass a very menacing sign painted in dripping red on a gate a few miles away saying  'Keep out...I am watching you...'

It just used to make me feel cross and slightly rebellious rather than fearful and law-abiding, a mood I may have unwittingly passed onto my children thinking back to the Kayaker's dare-devil bandit runs on out-of-bounds rivers years later. And all making me want to access my inner-trespasser, because somehow a book like this makes me feel that these Old Ways should and do belong to all of us.

 

 

The Nature Table : After the Rain...

It is May Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK. so wishing everyone a relaxing few days if you are having a 'rest' from the usual as we are.

Now I won't go on about  the weather because I think everyone here has been in the same boat... mention drought... make it official and there follows more rain than we know what to do with. But after the rain, when I finally managed to get out and have a look, there was everything ready and waiting to unfurl so rather than pick it and bring it home to wilt on any Nature Table I thought we could have a virtual one here every now and then, leaving everything safely where it belongs.

I am making myself stop and stare and look very closely for patterns out along the lane these days and some of the best seem to be in the simplest things that I might usually ignore...

Some nice fungi up in the Bluebell Woods too...

a very bedraggled Orange Tip ...

but this is most definitely the year of the very beautiful Peacock, this one supping on bluebells and drunk enough to almost let me scoop it up...



 

A Nature Walk...

The Kayaker was home over Easter so he and I went for a long walk, he took his camera and I introduced him to some of the friends I usually meet along the way, we soon drift back into that mother-son When We Were Six thing...

"....We went to all the places which a beetle might be near,
And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear,
And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout:
"A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"

and Alexander waved as he wandered on.

Credits ::
The Kayaker for the pics. 
A.A.Milne for Now We Are Six.  
Alexander. 
Me for not treading on Alexander (those are my lovely, well-worn Scarpa ZG boots )

Sightlines ~ Kathleen Jamie ...The Hvalsalen

' So how far is a blue whale do you think?'

I had asked Bookhound this simple question.

We were on our way to Bristol to see the Eric Ravilious exhibition. It's a two hour journey so we chat for a while as we get on the road and then settle into that companionable silence. One of us might flick the car radio on, the other will flick it off after a few minutes saying 'No the quiet is better' and we motor on.

At some point Bookhound usually says..

'He'll get done for that...'

as someone unwittingly steams past us on the A30 towards Tedburn St Mary, where of course us as lives y'ere know there is a speed camera around the next bend, but not everyone does.

In answer to my whale question Bookhound was bemused until I clarified,

'How many paces...'

'Oh that's easy, about a hundred and ten.'

Kathleen Jamie's writing, though offering the occasional greyscale photograph, is all about the mind's eye and imagining. Conjuring up the scene that is being set through quietly vivid description, and to which there is little sentimentality attached. It is writing that gently insists that a reader bring all their senses into play, sight, smell, touch, taste ...listen carefully and then make connections.

So Bookhound, admittedly at a bit of a disadvantage because he hasn't read the book... and he is concentrating on the road as one would wish him to, suggests in answer to my question that a blue whale is 'about a hundred and ten.'

Don't you just hate it when someone does that?? 

Because thanks to Sightlines, and Kathleen Jamie writing about her visit to the Hvalsalen (the Whale Hall) in the Natural History Museum in the Norwegian city of Bergen, and taking the trouble to pace out the length of a blue whale, I had this amazing figure in my head, which seemed massive and impossible and unthinkable, of fifty-seven.

Fifty seven.

'Don't be daft I said...that would be about a hundred metres...think about it, and that would mean Usain Bolt could run a blue whale in 9.58 seconds....'

Suddenly my really huge and exciting piece of Did-You-Know has shrunk to about 4.79 seconds of Usain Bolt's running time and I feel a bit deflated.

We motor on doing our usual ridiculous salute to the Willowman as we go past near Bridgewater, and I tell myself to remember to walk a blue whale along the lane when I get home.

I am definitely last across the finishing line with Kathleen Jamie's writing and have only myself to blame. Countless people were recommending Findings, the first book of essays, to me years ago and before I had even started writing dovegreyreader. And I kept meaning to but had never quite managed it, so when Sightlines, the latest collection, arrived I decided I would be on the case.

In fact I immediately realised I was reading something special so I went into rationing mode and in some cases have read a piece very slowly, and taken several days to allow for thinking time... as in The Hvalsalen.

The Hvalsalen houses twenty-four whale skeletons, each held aloft on chains, and, during Kathleen Jamie's visits, all in the midst of a two year programme of cleaning and refurbishment. When it becomes apparent that the treacle-brown residue on the bones is the oil still seeping out, and that the bones have been there since the 1860s, I felt something akin to a sadness of my own in the way that Kathleen Jamie expressed the single word..

'Still?'

It might be at this moment that every reader would bring something different to Sightlines, make different connections. I had read, who knows where, but I had definitely read something somewhere recently, about research that demonstrated whales were capable of forgiveness. It was a startling and humbling insight that had almost reduced me to tears.

And on top of that came the memory of the Kayaker's wonderful whale-watching job in New Zealand a few years ago and where, some of you may recall, he snapped this picture...

And I think this may be one of the purposes of a book like Sightlines.

Kathleen Jamie refers to 'connective leaps' and I felt so many throughout the book. There is a delicacy and a lightness of touch in the writing that belies the deep and lasting footprints that it has left in my mind, and each time a whale surfaces occasionally again in the book, as they do at sea, and I got another excited glimpse, or I cast my mind back to the first picture in the book of the eardrum of a whale in the museum at Stromness, I felt a real sense of anticipation and privilege, as if this was happening for real.

The eardrum seems no coincidence to me now. No chance picture that would make me think 'Huh, what's all this about'.. maybe instead it was telling me to listen carefully.

Themes brush against each other gently and unobtrusively and again I suspect every reader will spot different ones. The collection has been put together with great sensitivity and I will write more about it because I am still listening, and every so often another glimmer of light seeps through in my mind.  It is a book that illuminates around the edges, the aurora, moonlight, the day in February when the light seems to 'come back'...

'...the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky...an invasion of light and air out of a sky of swiftly moving clouds.'

I know this day and I must look out for it next year.

 

 

The Nature Table

I hope and feel sure that classrooms still have Nature Tables.

Ours was a place to deposit all those things we had found on the way to school...nothing very exciting in the grand scheme of things but treasures all the same to us...pristine conkers, or some shells from a hatched bird's egg. One poor soul had kept a bird's nest warm and watered and ended up with a house overrun with fleas that then had to be fumigated, so bird's nests were banned.

My Nature Table now of the bookish variety, and thanks to all your suggestions and a few additions of mine own I am building up a wonderful selection of books I can't wait to read. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin is now in its third year of reading so I probably do need to visit somewhere else. 

There was precariousness involved in taking this picture, and a pile of very soggy mud beneath just waiting to receive, but it seemed worth the risk...

Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways is starting to make me aware in ways I wouldn't have thought possible. Suddenly I have the urge to know more about the actual land beneath my feet, and I have had The Hidden Landscape by Richard Fortey biding its time for ages.

'...this enthralling exploration of time and place....peels away the top layer of the land to reveal he hidden landscape - the rock which contains the story of distant events, which dictate not only the personality of the landscape, but the nature of the soil, the plants that grown in it and the regional characteristics of the buildings....'

Here in the Tamar Valley the ground is oozing with minerals, copper and tine, arsenic, wolfram...an entire Periodic Table beneath the soles of my boots; mine surveys were compulsory when we bought this house (which wasn't the case everywhere then.) Now I am not sure whether I am likely to get bogged down (sorry) in the Palaeozoic and the Jurassic, and whether this book will be accessible enough for me, but I am going to dip in and have a dig around... I'll stop now before I start on about 'mining rich seams of writing'...it can only get worse.

Robert Macfarlane quotes Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran as one of those seminal books which kicked off the whole psycho-geography, 'looking at landscape differently' trend in writing, and thanks too to John Self's prompt in comments I immediately ordered a copy. This is one man's fifteen year epic work on the exploration of the islands of Aran, off the west coast of Ireland... I've owned up already to being the embarrassed numpty who had somehow assumed they were off Scotland, though I'm not sure where 'off Scotland'  I thought they might be.

In this seemingly small world of landscape writing it is Robert Macfarlane who has written the introduction, firmly locating the islands thirty miles offshore from Connemara, where big Atlantic storms prevail, and Tim Robinson immediately comes across as pretty keen to do his work. Circumnavigating the island and in bad weather (of which there must have been plenty) apparently holding his book and pencil inside a clear plastic bag tied shut at his wrists, I am immediately worried about what happens if he trips and falls. I expect to find out and I also expect I shall want to visit Aran once I've read it and it will be but a short hop from there to wanting to knit something.

I haven't worn an Aran jumper for years...since 1977 when my mum knitted me one actually, and I mistakenly wore it to do a video assessment of my teaching skills on my health visitor training course. Please don't do this unless you want the whole class to fall off their chairs laughing on playback, because you will fill the screen and resemble a well-cabled polar bear....and if proof were needed...

Oh alright here it is...


OK...now just get back on your chairs...that'll do.

A Wilder Vein and In Her Element are anthologies of women's writing on landscape. In Her Element, published by Honno, has 'mountaineers, amblers, star-gazers, river-watchers, cavers, climbers, farmers, artists, sailors and ecologists' all contributing their thoughts on the Welsh landscapes that have shaped their lives, whilst A Wilder Vein (with another introduction by Robert Mac) 'focuses on relationships between the people and the wild places of Britain and Ireland.' Dipping in I spy Ardnamurchan, Skokholm, the Yorkshire Dales, Humber and the Highlands to name a few.

I wonder how women may see and write this differently, in a genre that seems to be well-populated by men??

I am new to the writing of Richard Mabey but my thanks to Profile Books who wrote to me about something else but responded to my pleas with a parcel of books which included The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn, a series of meditations on sensory responses and how they influence our interactions and attitudes towards nature. It is a small book which I suspect contains far more than one reading will reveal, and will doubtless have me going around sniffing things next. I will have no trouble finding specimens to relate to when I have read Weeds The Story of Outlaw Plants. We have long given up the battle and instead learned to live alongside and amongst weeds as a 'flower by any other name' ...you cannot fight nature when you live slap bang in the middle of it as we do, and nor would an immaculately manicured garden look real in the middle of that environment...or so we tell ourselves in its absence, especially after the recent landscaping escapade. I love the idea of this book, a cultural history of weeds, these 'indomitable, opportunist plants which thrive best where we may want them least.'

I had snuck back to Notes From Walnut Tree Farm one night last week, it is a book which feels like an old friend now and came across a quote that I immediately had to write down.

'I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends I have to cultivate...'

Doesn't Roger Deakin have a wonderfully direct and uncompromising way of saying what he means.

And finally several of you mentioned The Sea Room by Adam Nicolson and you are in great company because our friend Robert mentions it too in The Old Ways. One of the ancient routes he travels is by sea from Lewis to the Shiants, (pronounced Shants)  the three islands inherited by Adam Nicholson at the age of twenty-one.

Described as 'one of the most beautiful places on the planet' I can't disagree having found this picture, and as a celebration of island life the book will apparently fill me with homesickness for a place I have never been to.

It might be the one I read next after Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines, which currently has my undivided attention and I will have much to say about it.

And bookmarks...I almost forgot.

I ordered some cards from Janis Goodman a regular commenter here and Janis kindly included some postcards of her etchings...what's not to love.

We expect our own Happy Returners very soon.