Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

March, Longing for Spring.

I was young at the beginning of winter. Easily sustained by a lichen on a trunk or an icy turquoise sky. But now, it’s March and I’m ninety nine years older, each miracle is less nutritious. I’m impatient with the slow    drip      drip    of spring. Cold, creeping light, is too cold, too reluctant. Only snowdrops, for weeks. Then aconites, in mud. Bird song, on deaf old ears. Catkins, just hang. I can see the magic weakly but I’m thirsty for more. 

I know these precious drops will become a steady trickle until by June I am soaked to the skin in a torrent of blossom and a rainbow of greens.

It’s just that as it starts to snow again, I wonder if I’ve got the strength to wait.

February, A plea for Scrub.

Farmers, single issue conservationists, neat and tidy minded people all agree that scrub is the enemy. It’s a loss of control, an invasion of space, a living metaphor for moral decline. Farmers are paid to “reclaim” scrubland or warn of low lamb prices and the disastrous consequences that will surely follow - less sheep, more scrub. Conservationists blame scrub for the loss of a particular leaf which rare butterfly caterpillars eat. Everyone knows that scrub encourages fly tipping, drug taking and murder! Culturally we seem to have a loathing for our most common and freely given plants.

The black thorn and the hawthorn, bramble, gorse and broom, the humble rush among others, are the bottom of a beautifully complex food chain. They are necessary in abundance to sustain the insects, birds and animals we all love. They grow enthusiastically and freely where ever they find half a chance.The first inhabitants of this country after the last ice age, they are more English than fish and chips. More English than the English. They are unpaid nurse maids to slower growing trees, no need for plastic tubes when a young oak is protected by a blackthorn. It’s no surprise that such a wealth of life has evolved  in association with them. Free, with scrub comes colour, movement, scent, song, birth, death and everything in between. 

I understand that the farmer has scrub clearance in his DNA. Even now, with his machinery and his deadly chemicals he can’t let go of the eternal enmity. His modern computerised efficiency leaves no corner unkempt. I understand the rare butterfly lover, I really do. I’m as saddened by the loss of unique habitats as anyone. But it seems to me, here in East Anglia, that the rate with which we are destroying everything natural is only getting faster and I wonder if perhaps we should look at what we do still have and make an effort to cherish that, before we get to the point when we are trying to recreate what was once most common.

The field, that has held my attention for twenty years, that surprises and enchants me every day, that I can draw and paint and write about endlessly is only scrubland. There are ‘common’ plants growing here that I don’t see anywhere else. There are more insects in this small island of wildness than in the thousands of acres of arable land around. It’s hard to believe in the received wisdom that scrub is worthless when all I see is so obviously worthwhile.

Shouldn’t we be giving thanks for prickly places? Rejoicing in a self sown riot of life? Counting our blessings for all that is local and overlooked, for the miracle of being able to take things for granted? As a society I wish we would realise that here are all the riches of the earth, right under our noses if only we could open our eyes and see them.

April, Standing Back From Blossom.

I wonder if I have a bit of bee in me? I’m attracted to blossom like an iron filing to a magnet. The minute I see any, I have an insatiable desire to get right up into it. Nectar’s not my aim, no, I just want to feast my eyes. Look at the shape and number of petals, the stamens, the way it sits on the branch. The smell of it. Watch the insects on it. Loose myself, swoon at this perfect moment, and then I invariably try to draw or paint it. I have hundreds of unsuccessful drawings of mad frothiness., with no structure, no edge, no tone and absolutely no merit. I desperately want to convey the thrilling intoxication I feel for this fleeting beauty, but I never do, I just make a mess.

So this year I’ve decided to stand back from blossom. To look at it in the landscape. First there’s the blackthorn, little pin pricks swelling into smoke that drifts through cold, dark woods and along dead hedges. Then the wild cherry blossom twinned with tiny mustard leaves. Echoing the white April clouds, pot bellied with rain. Punching holes in the material world for the sky to fill. There’s the pear, blossoming thick and creamy against the large, three stemmed birch, dripping with ochre catkins. As the sky darkens behind a landscape of bud, young leaf, blossom, twig and trunk., it sings it’s frilly tune in harmony with the rest. It illuminates rain drops and dares to compete with rainbows. So with the dainty crab apple serving up it’s pink delights at the moment and the blossom of all blossoms, the may, yet to come, I’ll keep my distance and try to remember that what makes blossom so achingly sweet is its temporary part in the whole.

Well, maybe I might, just once, bury myself deep within an apple tree, but I’m definitely not taking my paints with me this year.

November, The Disrobing of the Field Maple

While my back was turned (I’ve been away for a few days) the beautiful field maple has disrobed. Like any glamorous love interest knows, there comes a time when you shimmy out of your breathtakingly slinky attire and into the hero’s embrace. To spare your blushes the camera looks lingeringly at the sensuously rumpled heap of expensive material at your bare feet. Well, field maple are the breathless screen goddess of the tree world at the moment. Her leaves have been shining gold with such brilliance for the last few weeks that the hero could hardly have missed her. And then suddenly one day she undresses, she quietly sheds her splendid raiment. And there they are, a golden carpet of leaves at her feet and there she is, exposed in all her wooden, branching, naked beauty.

October, Arthur’s Cows.

Arthur has only brought six of the cows back this year. Bossy Cow’s back and Annoying Cow’s here, and her daughter, who for the moment I can’t think of an obvious name for. And each of them has a small bull calf. The field has had six months of grazing free, riotous growth. The huge quantity of foliage seems to swallow the cows completely. Hidden amongst small alder trees and wading, shoulder deep through the entwined carpet of vetch, clover, mint, chickweed, ragged robin and a hundred different grasses, they’re almost invisible. Some days I don’t see them at all. Clumsy and blundering as they seem, they set about eating this plant paradise in a very thoughtful and thorough way. The first sweep of the field is basically a hunt for meadow vetchling. They love this delicate relation of the pea and not a single yellow flower remains by the second day. They then take a slightly more leisurely and varied approach to their menu, opting mainly for tufted vetch and clover. Stopping to spend a hot sunny afternoon under a large crab apple tree, happily crunching the enormous sour fruit.

Meanwhile, the calves have been chasing each other in and out of the trees, sparing or lying together in the sun. Following their mothers who are busily distilling the sweet, flowery essence of summer into warm, frothy, milk. And so, udders swinging, this little group moves round and round the field picking the tenderest plants, until by March, only the least palatable survive. All those sunny summer months will have been converted into three fine bullocks, seeds will have been dispersed and the whole process is ready to start again.

September, Sloes.

This is the year of the sloe. Blackthorn thickets are literally bubbling with fruit. Blue, black jewels glittering amongst the yellowing leaves. So plentiful this year they seem to hang in bunches like grapes. But how deceiving looks can be, put one in your mouth and you’ll certainly never forget it. Imagine, this small round beauty, modestly blushing blue, unexpectedly seems to expand as your teeth pierce it’s flesh. You’re slow to comprehend the mixture of cotton wool, blotting paper and lemon juice which has just exploded into your head. First the dryness, all moisture is sucked from your mouth. Then a woolly roughness. And then an astringency no lemon can prepare you for. All your fruity expectations have been confounded. And although the initial awfulness wears off, you’re left for hours with the horrible remembrance. Your taste buds are saturated with the bitterness. Your teeth feel dry for hours. Years ago my brothers and I spent a memorable afternoon trying to eat sloes without showing a trace of a grimace. Laughing at each other till we wept, I’m not sure we ever managed it but I do remember the terrible headache I went to bed with that evening. So, having learnt my lesson all those years ago, I’m happy just to devour them with my eyes now.

July, Crunching Butterflies

I am standing by a bramble bush in the sun. I’m trying to draw the hundreds of butterflies on and around it. My two lurchers are chasing each other round and round, burning off some energy after a long day spent lying about. I’m looking at the simple five petal flower of the bramble. It’s as unshowy as the butterflies that are flocking to it. I remember a programme I watched about how insects see. It said that they can see ultra violet light (which we can’t) and it showed a scene a bit like the one I’m looking at, in ultra violet light. Instantly it was unrecognisable. The drab brown butterfly with the pale edges to the tips of it’s wings was now purple and black striped, the plain pink flower was orange and covered in silvery dots. With the lights back to normal you couldn’t see, even the faintest trace of these other, ultra violet, markings. I’m in a world of winged semaphore. Of lepidoptera invisible ink. Silent Morse-code. Glinting flashes and pulses. Signals with urgent meaning. Imagine what it’s like to be in command of the entire light spectrum. To be able to bend it and reflect it at your will.

A butterfly’s experience of here, in this field, right now, is so profoundly different from mine. And that melodious blackbird singing above our heads is having another different, blackbird reality, and the butterfly and I are experiencing him and his singing differently. The butterfly, the blackbird and I, we none of us have the truth of this place, we all have a little part of it. Like the compound eye of an insect, each of our realities is an angle on the lens. All together, they make up the whole.

And then my reverie is broken by the crash of the dogs as they career into the bramble bush and collapse at my feet, panting horribly loudly. The butterflies take off in fright and I stand still, waiting for them to settle. I’m trying to draw the jerky fluttering of a Ringlet over there. Slinky follows my gaze, jumps up, and in one bound…. crunch, he’s eaten it! A prism of sunlight, scratchily (I hope) descending his gullet into eternal darkness.

June foliage

I’ve been in the clean, cool freshness of the Cumbrian fells for a while. It’s a place of rocks, of shale and granite and quartz. Of igneous intrusions and volcanic plugs. And over all this hard surface tumbles water. Fast moving becks, clear swirling rivers, deep cold lakes. And then there’s the space…. Miles and miles of air between you and the horizon. To draw the hills is actually to draw the huge volume of nothing between you and them. Strangely, the invisible in a drawing, is more important than the visible.

It was unexpectedly comforting to slip into the luxuriant leafy embrace and familiar green light of home on my return. The horizon line here is the nearest plant. The sky is only shapes, glimpsed through greenery. Grass brushes against my thighs, ash leaves slap my neck. Here, in summer, I am literally engulfed by plants. The water is slow and green and warm, lazily dispersing golden green light onto the undersides of leaves. I’m swallowed by growth. The air is choked with insects. In this flat featureless place the flora becomes monumental. The poplars are like a mountain range forming an insurmountable barrier to the world beyond. Their tips catch the last of the evening light high above everything else. Mountain dwelling crows perch all- knowing in their crags.

I went blinking like a mole into the clear mountain light of the north. I breathed the fresh air. I stretched my cramped limbs in the endless space. I tried to draw it. It was lovely. But I’m happy to be home, submerged in my beloved myopic vegetable kingdom.

June, Grasses, Sedges, Rushes and Reeds.

The River-god Tmolus gave King Midas ass’s ears as a punishment for disagreeing with him at the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas. Embarrassed,Midas managed to concealed them under a hat and the only person who knew about them was his barber. But the secret was too much for the poor man and in desperation he dug a hole in the river bank and whispered into it,“King Midas has ass’s ears!” Feeling much relieved, he filled up the hole and went on his way…. Until a reed sprouted there and began to whisper the secret to any one who passed by.

I was thinking of Midas and his ass’s ears as I looked at the ocean of grass keeping me to the paths in the field at this time of year. And as I listened to it sighing and whooshing, and the millions of grasshoppers trying to make their scratchy love songs heard above the rustling, I realised I didn’t know the name of a single grass or sedge or rush or reed. So, I’ve spent this week picking and drawing as many different types as I could find and then trying to identify them. Quite quickly I wished I had a degree in plant biology. Descriptions of culms, ligules, glumes, lemmas, paleas and panicles mean nothing to me. Mention of hygroscopic caryopsis is too much. Do I really care if that delicate grass dripping in dew is Grey Hair-Grass, Early Hair-Grass or Silvery Hair-Grass? No. I’m content to admire it’s subtle beauty and listen to it whisper other peoples silly secrets.