Tooth of the lion

It is dandelion season. They cluster along the edges of roadsides and take over patches of waste ground. They push up from cracks in the pavement and squat in gutters. While the daffodils are withered and brown and the white dead nettle too subtle to compete, it is the dandelions, with their extrovert yellow, that steal the glory.

It was in the 1500s that they became associated with the lion, their jagged leaves giving them the name of lion’s tooth, or dent-de-lion. But their rich colour is also reminiscent of the sun, ruler of Leo, the astrological lion. Today, they have lost any regal associations and are seen as nothing but a weed, inconvenient or despised, depending on your point of view. Yet a field of dandelions is easily as beautiful as one of more well-regarded wildflowers.

When you live in a town, you find the wild where you can. Not just in the obvious parks and squares, but in the edges, the forgotten corners and in the overlooked plants. Since lockdown, when the weeds were given free rein to grow where they might, there seem to be more of them. Weeds have always found enterprising spaces, but they have had a little freedom and are taking advantage of it.

I delight in the dandelions’ beauty in the urban wild, but in the yard, I give them no mercy, pulling them from pots to allow other flowers to flourish. As anyone knows who has tried to dislodge a dandelion, they cling to the soil with a lion’s strength. And they are resilient. Only a few days after the grass mower in the park destroys any flower that has dared to grow, dandelions appear again, pushing up through the grass clippings. They will be with us all through the summer, when we’re distracted by other blooms, and through the turn of another season into autumn, reminding us that beauty is always there in the humblest package.

They remind us too, that nature is forever transforming itself. It isn’t long before the patches of yellow re-emerge as delicate globes, filagrees of seeds ready to be swept away by wind or breath. These spheres are much less robust than the flowers that came before them, those tiny seeds bearing no resemblance to what they will become. But that is the point. Their purpose is to travel: to float and to dance on the whim of the breeze, before finally coming to rest, perhaps far from where they began. The dandelion shifts from form to form effortlessly. As we move into the height of spring, we could learn from its bold journey of renewal.

Re-shaping

I stand under the wild cherry tree, hand resting on its shattered heart.  This is my portal tree.  Stand beneath it in spring and you are intoxicated by the froth of blossom and light.  In autumn, its gilded canopy bathes you in gold.  Stand there long enough and you feel that you are no longer in an urban park, but in another place altogether, shimmering between worlds.  But last year, a winter storm cleaved the trunk in two, shearing away a large bough and leaving the heart blasted open.  I count at least fifteen rings where the wood has shattered. The vulnerable heartwood is sticky with sap.  I wonder if it will survive another fifteen years. And yet blossom time arrived and it blossomed just as it always has. The branches are sparser now, but it is surviving, with small green cherries already visible among the leaves.

For months, I have been silent, with no words to offer to the world. The year turned through each season, from spring to spring again. We were seared by the hottest day on record, watched wildfires burn out of control and suffered from the lack of rain. The landscape visibly changed. Storms, floods and fire re-shaped the world and our neighbourhoods. After our human pandemic, thousands of crabs washed up dead on our local beaches and our coastal birds were decimated by bird flu. Businesses have closed and our town is full of empty shops. People worry about how they will pay their bills and use food banks so that they can eat. Our health service crumbles and there are strikes by doctors, nurses and others. At times, it seems like everything is broken. At times, it seems apocalyptic.

And as the world changed, I changed with it. I have been buffeted by the winds that felled the trees, baked by the scorching sun, felled by the virus, but more than that. I am feeling my age. There is a re-making, a re-shaping of myself afoot. I have moved into the third act of life and the crone is approaching. It is a time to measure with joy or regret. A time to grieve the things I will now never be or do and put to bed those imagined other lives. There are now things it is pointless to spend time on because the return won’t be worth it. Nor should I worry about a legacy when we are all forgotten in the end. It’s a time to consider how I want to spend my precious future. Rekindling my creativity seems urgent. Every Friday I think this will be the weekend I write, but I can’t quite translate thought into action.

On the morning after the winter solstice, when the sun was new once more, I stood under a sky streaked crimson and wondered how to make this year count. I hadn’t watched a sunrise for months. I’d lost that everyday connection to the natural world and I wanted it back again. I started with the basics: attention and curiosity. Each day I would spend at least five minutes paying full attention to the world: rain-washed pavements like polished jet, old stones gilded by the setting sun, a full moon turning the clouds sepia, a rainbow in a denim blue sky, gulls huddled on a frozen lake, waves like white horses with manes of spume.

In the park, scores of baby trees, planted by children, are surviving. Some grow crooked, some seem too fragile to persist, but they grow all the same. Wildflower seeds scattered last year have brought poppies, cornflowers and scorpion weed. The town square has been restored to its Georgian finery and a nearby street pedestrianised, in the hope of bringing people back. Birds proclaim from hedgerows clotted with hawthorn blossom. I see my first swallow and my first butterfly. The world may have changed, and us with it, but that is nothing new. Hope carries us forward until the season turns again.

Growing

Flowers are like ideas; they bloom when we aren’t watching. All of a sudden, they are there, where they weren’t before, sometimes just a fragile shoot, sometimes a flower fully unfurled. I wonder if it would be possible to witness a flower’s birth. If I had the time and the patience to gaze at a patch of ground, would I see the moment the shoot broke the soil? Perhaps this is one of nature’s private things, slow and hidden to allow the magic to get in. Like the idea that has germinated slowly in the soil of the imagination, but is suddenly there when you need it.

Quite suddenly, the rafts of vivid dandelions have become clocks. The road to the dene has sprouted clouds of cow parsley, peppered with dandelions and a little Herb Robert. The hawthorn unfolds bashfully, most blooms no more than ivory beads, but some boughs offering thick white blossom in contrast to the parsley’s lace. Pinpricks of purple from green alkanet brighten the gloom of the undergrowth, while stinging nettle and white dead nettle line the border between path and hedgerow.

In the upper dene blossom season is in full flow: rowans, service trees and cherries illuminate the banks of the burn. A few patches of bluebells sprout at the base of a sycamore. The stream trickles gently in places but is dry in others. Patches of meadow have been left to grow when the grass has been cut; abstract collections of dandelion, groundsel, ribwort plantain and wild grasses. An old tree stump, with gnarled silver bark rests on the edge of a circular patch of meadow, like a seat waiting for a storyteller. It has become one of those enchanted places in the landscape where anything might happen. From that perch perhaps I could witness the meadow grow.

The burn is crowded with bullrush spears and marsh marigolds. The small pond is green with weed and bulrush. As we cross the bridge to the main pond, past its goat willow guardian, we walk through a drift of down. The water birds are all in hiding. A small flock of feral pigeons pecks around the shore. A wood pigeon forages in a patch of dandelion clocks. Sparrows flutter and chatter between bushes and reeds. There is an orchestra of birdsong. I recognise the blackbirds, the robins, the chiff chaff and tits, but the rest is lost in a sweet cacophony. We sit by the pond for a while, shaded by the weeping willows, listening, watching the sparrows dance. I wonder how many ideas have been planted at the edge of this pond, ideas that will stay hidden until their time is ripe.

When my world is small and I stay close to home, ideas come slowly. Without input, they fail to germinate. Without those many small interactions with the world, the spark doesn’t catch. Movement releases them. Not only these walks in nature, but the casual stroll across the park to work, the view out onto gull-crowded roofs, the bus ride past fields and hedgerows, the dawn walk along the shore. We aren’t at normal yet. Restrictions are lifting, but the cases in our town are rising again. I have had both vaccinations, but I am cautious. My world is still smaller, but it is slowly expanding.

We leave the dene through an arch of blossoming cherries. The trees are noisy with the hiss of starlings. The birds hop from branch to branch, some preening wet feathers of blue, green and purple. For a while their chatter fills the air, until we turn for home and their noise fades. We pass a lone blackbird, perched at the top of a fence. The starlings’ song speaks of careless exuberance, whereas the blackbird seems to be singing for his life. With spring comes movement, both sprightly and serious. Already, the sparks begin to catch. I can’t see it, but the magic is happening, my mind is sprouting ideas.

Baked

The last weeks of August sizzle.  Furnace days that pass like treacle.  Hottest days on record, air so close it’s hard to breathe.  Air so hot it’s impossible to get relief.  Sleepless nights.  Sticky, long days of hard brilliance.  August is stuck in amber: it seems it will never end.

But finally the amber cracks.  On the morning of the storm the world is damp with dew and the sun is a blazing orange balloon.  We know the storm is coming, but it isn’t until the hour before midnight that it appears.  Two booms of thunder and a neon flash herald its arrival.  The next crash envelops the house, as though giving birth to it.  Lightning flares every few seconds.  Thunder grumbles.  Rain hammers down.

In the morning the landscape is scoured clean.  Green is greener, more vivid after rain.  There is energy in the air.  In the deluge, autumn’s blooms have blossomed: a bouquet of fungi along the paths.  It has been a good summer for fungi, despite the heat.  There has been a bountiful harvest of field mushrooms in the park and a scattering of fairy rings.

A day after the storm, it is cool enough to walk the wagonway.  The hedgerows bulge with fruits.   Birds nests of wild carrot, fat with lilac seeds.   Horse chestnuts ripe with conkers, still encased in green.  Bushes full of blackberries.  The wind teases willowherb seeds from their stalks so that I walk through drifts of down.  I hear the steam train chug and whistle down the nearby museum track.

The flowers are few now: a clump of willowherbs here, ragworts there, clusters of fleabane and sow thistles.  Insects jostle for space on those blooms that remain: hoverflies, bees and flies, speckled wood butterflies.  Dragonflies dart across the path moving between ponds and patches of damp ground.   There is still little evidence of birds: a couple of wood pigeons, the song of a robin and the twittering of a few hidden blue tits.

In the dene, it already seems like autumn.  The avenue of lindens has released a drift of tawny flower casings that look like heaps of autumn leaves.  August is finally over and the scent of a new season is in the air.

I was introduced to the wonderful book Saxon’s Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion some time ago and I was thrilled to see he was crowdfunding to publish his next novel Draca through Unbound.  The book is about a former Royal Marine haunted by his past and possibly by the old boat left to him by his grandfather.  Half of the profits will go to the veteran’s charity Combat Stress.  Geoff has been offered a great opportunity to promote the book at a festival alongside a ‘household TV name’ if it is published in time.  Pledges are currently at 89% but he only has two weeks to reach 100% if he is to get the opportunity.  That’s only 60 books, so please consider pledging to enjoy what I expect will be a great read and to help out combat veterans too!  You can find out more here.

Fledging

Canada Geese

Canada Geese

Canada Geese

Robin

Wren

Blue Tit

Sometimes, the earth conspires in gracious serendipity so that you think it’s sending a message just for you.  On the week that I begin writing again I witness so many tiny wonders that it seems like a sign, dovetailing with my newly awakened inspiration.

The day after inspiration strikes, I am greeted by the first goslings of the year.  A pair of Canada Geese stand guard as their brood peck nonchalantly at the grass.  Later, they slip into the water to pirouette around the pond, the parents heads bobbing, as though pointing the right direction, a gentle honk calling back any stragglers.  On another pond, the punk orange heads of baby Coots and Moorhen chicks peeking through the reeds.  The smaller birds are harder to see at this time of year, but I can hear their ardent songs and glimpse them high in the trees.  And at the end of this enchanted week, the first of the swallow family appear: sand martins flitting around the cliffs at the coast.

Campion

Cabbage White

Comma

Orange tip

Overnight, new life has appeared.  The pinks have begun to join the yellows, with an abundance of campion lining the paths.  A handful of delicate cuckoo flowers contrast with monstrous butterbur leaves.  I see my first orange-tipped butterflies and a comma feeding on the dandelions and watch cabbage whites dance together in delicate spirals.  It is blossom season, but this year I’ve been more attentive to the subtler flowers of the trees.  The flowers that we don’t always notice: the broccoli like florets of the ash and the tiny green sprays of the sycamore.  I saw my first hawthorn blossom at the rubbish dump, of all places, brightening up the wait to get rid of our clutter.

Horse chestnut

Bird Cherry

Sycamore

Ash

This year I’ve struggled to re-balance after the winter.  I began the season with a box of dreams sown in the dark months and an impatience to bring them to life.  Instead, I fell into a fallow period that persisted for the first quarter of the year.  Spring has been slow to come, not in the earth but in my spirit.  My creativity has gone, not into my craft, but into my home.  An extended period of nesting: weeks of wallpaper, paint, carpets and curtains.  Bags and bags of clutter divested, clearing a space for other things to come in.  But now I’m fledging the nest.  Beltane is the start of summer, the first big festival of the light half of the year.  It came and went without much ceremony.  But I was waiting, I think, for the earth to let me know it was time to give birth to my plans.

Tynemouth Priory and castle with a view of Collingwood’s monument

Tynemouth Priory

In another moment of serendipity, after writing about ruins, I have cause to visit the 7th century priory that broods over the mouth of the river.  I wander ruins overgrown by Alexander flowers, unconsciously absorbing history and landscape.  And it is the ruins that wake my creativity, insinuating themselves into the half-written second novel that has waited for attention since last year, taking it into a more satisfying direction.  So as the signs of new life flourish, I find myself in that magical space at the beginning of a creative adventure, at the point where ideas might take flight or never leave the ground.  I hope they soar.