Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

June, Nettles

Nettles, stiff and upright line my path through the wood to the big field. I’m the Queen inspecting my troops as I walk past. Or, as they’re all in khaki perhaps I’m Winston Churchill and it’s the second world. Is that my grandfather over there? Or maybe I’m a military dictator. I’m Kim Jong-il, and these are North Korean troops. Now the idea of nettles being battalions of soldiers is in my head, I can’t walk down the track without straightening my shoulders just a little bit and slackening my pace to something more dignified and respectful. In fact, I’ve just read that nettles do have a military connection. They are so plentiful and their stems so fibrous that during the first world war Germany used them to make military cloth as supplies of cotton ran out. And in the second world war Britain used nettle chlorophyll as a dye for camouflage nets. It’s the fibrous stem that makes them stand to attention so rigidly while plants around them droop and bend and sway. And of course nettles are armed. Only using their weapon in defence, although it can feel like an outrageously unjust attack sometimes.

At the moment they’re flowering and here my military metaphor falters. The flowers are so delicate, so subtle and so untidy that they are the complete antithesis of a macho, disciplined army. Some are pink, coordinating with the wine red stem, some blue and some pale green. Little ribbons of tiny beads that glow when back lit. Pain and pleasure in one plant, indiscriminate poison on one hand, fragile beauty on the other.

May, Willow Seeds

Willow seeds, snug in their cotton wool cocoons have been filling the air like a blizzard. Everything is white, covered in these flighty little puffs of nothingness. It’s not the dazzling, coloured, reflecting white of snow. It’s more like the dull paleness of dust and it gets caught in cobwebs, snarled up round the stems of things, settles in flowers and balances wobbling on branches. But one breath of wind and it’s all up in the air again. The place turns from Miss Haversham’s house to snow globe in one gust. Slinky (my dark grey, shaggy lurcher) turns from wolf to wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing within a minute of lying down.

For weeks these dainty little seeds have been floating off the willows in their millions. On hot still days the soft avalanche is never ending. If the temperature drops, the seeds stop. And off they go again as the heat returns. Last week was hot and unruffled, not a breath of wind. Willow seed all round me. All moving in one direction. A ceaseless flow of fluff, moving urgently past me. And as I really began to look I could see a stream of white going in a different direction to my left. The tiniest air currents seemed to be wafting seed in purposeful rivers of motion. Like a miniature and gentler version of of the alarming and unpredictable wind in mountains. Updraughts, downdraught’s, crosswinds, slipstreams and whirlwinds. Each bush or tree or even each blade of grass, creating it’s own currents and disturbances. All imperceptible to me. Does an insect have to think about the downdraught as it attempts to land on an elder flower? How buffeted a flimsy mosquito must get in it’s unquenchable search for blood. I feel very big and very clumsy as I stand and watch these tiny scraps of genetic material alive to things I can’t ever know.

May, Flowers

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine;

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamelled skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

There’s a place under a huge blossomed hawthorn strewn with so many different flowers of such vibrant colours that I think of Oberon’s speech every time I walk through it. And when ever I walk through it I have an irresistible urge to stop and sit down. It’s impossible to hurry past a place like this and stupid not to take pleasure in such fleeting perfection. The ground is soft and thick with colour and shape. Small, blue and unblinking, speedwell. The colour of my grandmothers eyes. Complementing the waxy, yellow buttercups as they bounce the brilliant May sunlight around and around. Serrated silverweed, glinting quietly. Hot pink flashes of the first unfoldings of vetch. Dark and upright, new pin-rush piercing the electric flush of green. An iridescent beetle. Red ladybirds on yellow, on violet, on green and on silver. Huge bumble bees sounding like bombers coming in low and slow. A delicate fly with pale veined wings and translucent turquoise legs. A mad shiny little beetle that keeps falling into the lid of my pencil case and spinning round unbelievably fast on it’s back, legs wildly waving. And a thrush repeating and repeating and repeating itself, just above my head. All that’s missing is a snake skin wrap and some love potion. But I guess I can’t have everything.

May, Caterpillers.

It started as a small white silken triangle slung between two slender branches of a hawthorn bush about a month ago. I wondered if it was full of spiders? Would a splendid butterfly emerge from it? Then it began to grow. Every day it got a tiny bit bigger and everyday I became more intrigued by it. Eventually, I realised it was full of minuscule caterpillars. As the days went on I watched their routine of purposeful eating, spinning and geometrical sunbathing. As the cocoon grew so did the caterpillars. I looked them up in my butterfly and moth book and got lost in a world of sublime beauty and poetry. Would my caterpillars turn out to be Green Hairstreaks or Purple-shot Coppers? Or Mazarine Blues or Two-tailed Pashas or even Camberwell Beautys? Were they Dryads or Speckled Woods, Maps or Monarchs? They didn’t seem to be butterflys. So on to moths. Feathered Thorns, Willow Beautys, Death’s-head Hawk Moths, Poplar Kittens. Oh please let them be Muslin Footman, or True Lover’s Knots or Sprawlers or Snouts. No, nothing quite so poetic. I think they’re Brown Tails. Small, white almost fluffy moths, with brown tails!

I’ve grown unaccountably fond of them. I look forward to seeing them in the morning. Hoping a disaster hasn’t befallen them over night. I’m astounded by their spinning. With each layer they spin, they create double the space. Having two new surfaces they can now walk on. The inside is the most complex labyrinth imaginable. (Actually totally horrendous if you think about being in there. The ultimate horror story.)

From the tiny brownish squiggly things in the beginning they have grown into long, sleek, polished locomotives. All exact copies of each other, silently going about their ancient rituals. Somehow they are born knowing exactly what to do. Born knowing the urgency and the seriousness of the task ahead of them.

I want to shout at my children, who should be revising for exams. “ Look at these caterpillars. They don’t waste their time on Face book. They don’t spend all day in bed. They know life is a serious business. They get on with it. If they don’t, they die.”

But of course I don’t say anything and, on reflection, perhaps I prefer my lazy children to a bunch of fat automatons.

May, Dandelions

Dandelions, in one plant you have the sun and the moon. The yellow flowers are bright and sunny and en mass create a glow that can reflect off tree trunks and turn pristine white blossom strangely blue. They close at night as if mirroring their deity, the sun. And later, the delicate seed heads have always reminded me of the moon. With an ethereal glow as you walk through them at night, I’ve always felt I’ve been walking through stars. But then last night as I looked at them I thought that instead of each seed head being a star it was in fact a galaxy. Each tiny seed, a planet or star. The big white centre, a sun. The field was the universe. Earth is this tiny seed in this seed head galaxy at my feet. The next dandelion is another galaxy, light years away. And on and on and on, to the far side of the field and that faint white smudge. Feeling exhilerated and thinking about the furtherest reaches of the universe, I turned back for home and stopped in my tracks as I rounded the corner into the garden and saw thousands more dandelions spread before me. The universe had just expanded! But it didn’t stop there, as I thought about the dandelions by the crossroads…. And the field full of them in Marlingford…. And that roundabout in Norwich….. And that field in Rackheath…. And more in Hoveton…. and Holt…. and Houghton…. and even Hunstanton….. Feeling a bit delirious I made it to the back door before the universe could expand into Lincolnshire.

April, An Olfactory Feast

I’d been drawing the small patch of bird cherry that grows in one corner of the wood. It’s pretty much invisible for most of the year. Just more green leaves in the summer and just more unremarkable trunks in the winter. But for two weeks at the end of April it shouts spring as it covers itself with a mass of dainty white flowers arranged in elegantly dipping spikes. Loving our small patch, Ruby and I decided to go to an ancient wood a few miles away famed for it’s bird cherry. It was like walking into a fairy tale. There were foaming fountains, living wedding cakes, feathery mountains of blossom, still and pure and white above our heads as we walked through the shady wood on a carpet of bluebells. But almost unbelievably better than that, was the smell. It was intoxicating. After an hour in there we could hardly speak, hardly walk. We would have willingly gone home with complete strangers, believing anything they told us. The weirder the better. We just wanted to lie down and dream.

Drugged, and needing another olfactory fix we came home via Goose Common. We got lost walking along the narrow paths between towering, prickly, golden gorse into clearings around squat, wide branching oaks with more paths diving off into more gorse in all directions. Everything was bright and hot here. The sound of bees was deafening. The heat seemed to radiate from the sunny flowers themselves. And the sweet, soft, dry small of coconut wrapped itself languidly over everything. We wandered about for hours in the yellow maze. Drinking the air, imagining the taste of the honey.

December, Icicles

I realised, as I walked along the side of the stream that I don’t know anything about icicles. If I thought about them at all I saw icicles as long dagger shaped things that hang prettily above your head, made from melting water freezing. Hanging off the roof of an alpine chalet or something. It’s never cold enough here to have them for more than a day at most. Until now. And to my great surprise I find that each leaf and tiny stem bobbing in the current of the stream is being covered in thin layer after thin layer of ice. Building up what looks likes a bottle. Rather like a potter builds up a pot on their wheel. The black stream was decorated with millions of glinting, glittering and growing bottles. All slightly different, some joined together, some enormous, some lopsided, some top heavy, some bulging in the middle. And not a dagger shape to be seen.

December, A Spring.

Imagine a spring. Not a gurgling gush of crystal clear water tumbling over mossy boulders, ferns nodding merrily. No, this is a Norfolk spring. Think mud, more mud, pin rush, alders and snipe. Think cows up to their knees in mud as they walk through it.Well- not at the moment as it’s frozen solid but that’s the funny thing; in the summer the air around it is always very cold, it’s not somewhere you want to linger. But in this freezing weather the air around it feels warm. Every time I notice this temperature difference my imagination takes me down to the Underworld. To the Kingdom of Hades and Cerberus his six headed dog and then to poor Persephone, locked down there for these six winter months. Water from the Underworld oozing up to the surface with it’s own constant temperature, nothing to do with the fickle weather we are subjected to up here.

November, Snow

The 3 inches of snow we woke up to on Thursday have a transformative effect on the world. It’s like being some where quite familiar but not knowing it at all. What’s dark is light. What’s usually invisible is starkly outlined. What you know is there, has disappeared. Sound is muffled. And the cows marooned in the icy sea of white, are so brightly coloured, they’re shocking. And then  the sun comes out and autumn leaves begin to catch the light from under their sparkling blankets. This is autumn snow and as it melts it gives the last of the coloured leaves their final moment of glory on a glittering white background.

November, A Tempest

It hadn’t got light. It had rained all morning and the smell of turps in my studio was giving me a headache. But the rain had stopped and I thought it was safe to take the dogs for a walk. I set off without a coat. I walked along the stream and past the wood where I met Edward on his way home for lunch. We had a chat and it began to rain. I thought about turning back and decided not to be pathetic-it’s only rain. I turned up the track and it began to rain harder….and harder….and the wind began to blow. Shall I go back? No point, I’m already wet. Got to the top of the track and the rain got harder and the wind got stronger and my hat blew off and Slinky couldn’t walk in a straight line and then suddenly my boots were full of water and there was a river of cold water running down my back and a loud rumbling noise. I turned round and everything was black. Sticks and leaves started flying past me. I tucked myself into a hedge with the dogs while this tempest roared past. The world became invisible. Water was all I could see. And then it was over. I did turn back then! And by the time we arrived home the stream was a raging torrent, I was freezing cold and the sun was out.