'This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose...'
I'd have thought to wait until the autumn to quote this poem by Ted Hughes which I had read in my recent little sojourn in his company last week. It says so perfectly what we feel like on those mornings later in the year after a weather-beaten night, but it's all been very St Swithun's-appropriate lately and stormy with it.
We've had branches down blocking the lane and resting precariously on the phone lines for a while, but ever-vigilant Bookhound had the resulting log harvest safely gathered in once Highways had been and carved up the debris.
It would also have been good to have gathered the Gaze-Bo in safely too.
If only we had added storms + a Do-it-All structure together and come up with 'Let's get that in the shed pronto', but it was too late. It was Endsleigh Salon night and I had gifts of apple trees for our guest writer to think about and somehow the welfare of the Gaze-Bo was forgotten with predictable consequences.
I'm still reading Notes From Walnut Tree Farm contemporaneously through the year so our days are mirroring Roger Deakin's nicely (and Roger would have had no truck with a Do-It-All Gaze-Bo, his would have been living and growing) and perhaps we'd better live the Deakin Way because he gave me a good idea.
It is always possible to read Roger and find wisdom in a single sentence and be entirely happy with a compromise because he hates neatness too; so between us we can come up with something rural and in keeping.
Things like Roger doesn't mow his grass because all the blueness will go. In his case germander speedwell, in our case creaminess and clover.
So far beyond the point of planting, our Vegetable Garden has for this year been declared a guilt-assuaging Nature Garden (as if the rest of it isn't already) to attract bees and butterflies and things which chirrup, which basically means we'll just let another bit go wild, hack a path through and stare at it some more.
Early July and Roger's idea,
'I find that in the recent rain the seed pods of the common vetch have all burst open, revealing what at first glance I take to be jay feathers, but found were the striped insides of the seed pods.
I encourage them because of their beauty but also because they fix nitrogen back into the soil...the rain has softened them, then the sun has blackened and hardened them...'
So in between the deluges I'm out there in the lane looking and as sure as seed follows pod, there they are, in their millions.
I shall be scattering appropriately.
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