Winter Garden

From the upper lawn the view across the valley looked very green. A small patch of the Helford River was just visible beyond the specimen trees and the lower ponds, the woodland on the far hillside seeming an extension of the garden’s greenery. The water too was green, a deep teal, too far to see any movement, the day too dull for reflection or sparkle. But this is what Cornwall does best, nurtures its sheltered hollows of sub-tropical escape from the dull reality of the British weather so that even when a bright sunny day turns overcast you can walk beneath treeferns and bamboo stands green as ever – green as summer – and escape the grey.

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Robin & Redstart

 

A flit of movement catches the corner of my eye as I sit in the back window to write. The bird is the same colour as the bare tree branches, the back fence, the garden table, the floor outdoors: the base colour of winter under a uniform sky that’s trying to rain. Is it…? I wonder, scrabbling for my glasses to get a better look, but even before I put them on I see the flash of its russet frontage. Only a robin after all.

Retrospective: 2014 in 14

This seemed to work quite well last year so here’s this year’s shot at a little recap of 2014 in 14 sentences with 14 photos I’ve taken during the course of the year. If you click on the first image you can read the text alongside the pictures as you scroll through if you prefer.

On a blue Monday that sits like a clear bleb in the dregs of January I stay outdoors all day relishing cloudless skies until the sun goes down off Pennance Point and the stars appear one by one then a hundred, like a reverse rash of freckles in the absence of light.

So many things, I think as they seem to appear from feint to sharp whilst I look for them, to be grateful for.

How light is they sky behind the dark.

The closest I get to Valentine’s day melancholia this year is the realisation as I sit planning my future ventures that I will be financially penalised for travelling alone.

But I do it anyway and before I’ve had time to think myself out of it the journey of 100 thousand words begins with a single step, several missed and cancelled trains and a hotter day in mid March than ought to be expected after such a tempestuous start to the year’s weather.

With the sea to my left and a skylark up in my subconscious to my right I map by eye and foot my progress west with the unfurling of spring: each day another flower open from three days before, bluebells spiking up that, next week and twenty miles further round the coast, will be in bud.

A different landscape every day for thirty days, spanning moods and seasons; from bare branches and blackthorn blossom to foxglove waymarkers signposting the path up through the boulders; umpteen unidentifiable green and cream umbellifers, to seedheads and flowering grasses, meadow and field yellowing under the sun.

A defining moment – at Nanjizal, on the south-western brink of the British mainland in early June – shrouded in waterproofs, hood up and drawn in so that my view was limited to a small oblong peeping out into dripping rain as I traverse yet another granite zawn enjoying it as much as any day striding out in the sunshine.

This is who I am now, one woman on a peninsula: read into that what you will.

Far away in the forest five female tawny owls kewick across a valley filled with trees as far as the eye can see.

Then on a cloudy and otherwise unremarkable September day I clamber the boulders of the border shoreline into Devon and pick a pebble off the beach with Piran’s cross in quartz intruding through the slate.

Better the weight of stones in my pockets from a walk on the beach than the weight of worry on the mind.

But before I know it I’ve forgotten that blue Monday in the depth of winter and that grizzled Tuesday on the cusp of summer as the year closes in again and my mind closes down, drugged by the lack of daylight in my life in more ways than one I find it can be hard to recall how far I’ve come, how much I’ve gained through the weeks and months in this sad lethargy of deprivation.

My first Christmas day in Cornwall, absent from the family madness happening somewhere else in the country – not ‘at home’, but somehow at home in the sense that I was where I should be – I look out at dawn from the window overlooking the bay and I see how light is the sky behind the dark as I watch the midwinter sunrise over Gribbin Head.

Retrospective: 2013 in 13

Here’s 2013 in 13 sentences with 13 photos I’ve taken during the course of the year. I don’t know if it’s true that I spent more time in and around Falmouth than previous years, but it’s felt like it, so I’ve chosen to present a retrospective that reflects that. That’s not to say I didn’t go anywhere else or do anything outside of Falmouth and Cornwall, but I thought it would be appropriate to mark the passing of time focusing on the place I invested the most time in. If you click on the first image you can read alongside the pictures as you scroll through them if you prefer.

It began with rain.

After a brief spell housebound and wiping the mould off the insides of the walls I discovered that winter walking whatever the weather was an unacknowledged joy.

I found a wholesome, brown-bread, good-heartedness from the fallen leaves and mud and blood pumping through my veins that was as uplifting as finding the first patch of snowdrops among the treeroots.

Then in March the winds veered easterly and cold and I got my big green coat down from its peg where it had sat all winter, whilst at work in my new job I was given my pick of light spring clothes to wear against the hibernal chill.

The bluebells were late this year.

And the wildflowers that I’d obsessively observed and identified before the end of March last year held off their tangled millefleur tapestry until it should by all accounts have been nearly summer.

June became July then suddenly I was having dinner on the beach and paddling through an incoming tide as balmy as bathwater, getting a salt line on my sundress and barely needing a cardigan even after sundown as the ground released its heat like summer night storage heaters.

I discovered I was learning my way into the local landscape in such a way that I could almost tell the weather by the colour of the sea, and the creep of the seasons by the colour of the flowers.

And then the tourists came, and the parents came, and the weather was as I remember it the first August I saw Cornwall: blue summer that glints jewel-like in the sun; but to my adjusted eyes tired, drained and dried after the fresh colours, new growth and blossoms of early summer.

I enjoyed it though, the best summer for six years, forgiving it for giving way, somewhat predictably, to an overcast September that stayed warm but drew in the damp and the mists.

Though I missed the ‘mellow fruitfulness’ as it had mostly peaked too soon in the August heat and blackberries bloated to mush with the onset of Autumn.

So I got my wellies back out, now permanently ingrained with mud and salt.

And by the time December had sped by again – as always too-fast-too-busy, a four-week whirl of baking and PVA and glitter and wondering how many times it’s appropriate to buy my sister-in-law a scarf as a present – everybody but myself it seemed was surprised to be skirting weather disasters in order to make it home for Christmas and back again to work two days later before the rails and roads were underwater and storm gave way to storm and another year blew in on a downpour.

Winter Coat

All winter it hung on the back of the ironing room door, waiting for it to be cold enough outside to justify wearing it.

Christmas came and I travelled the breadth of the country one day before torrential rain flooded huge tracts of railway lines across the Westcountry making train journeys in either direction impossible.

But still it wasn’t cold enough to need the Winter Coat.

Walking Brown

Mud underfoot. Old mud on my boots. New mud on the old mud. My hair beneath my hat, the long rope of my plait. My jacket, faded in patches. Under the collar the deep fertile corduroy of a furrowed field, the bleached shoulders compacted loam.

Bare trees. Bark and branch. Damp stumps. Dead leaves hanging; dead leaves fallen. Dead leaves crunching beneath my tread; dead leaves catching in the breeze. Dead leaves soaking in the day old rain, dissolving like wet paper to a humic pulp.

Fence and fencepost. Gate and stile. Lichen. Lych gate. Grave stone under tree. Green shoots through roots and leaf drifts. The first crocus spears pale colour up.

Swan Baby Gone

February 15th 2013 

The first daffodils are showing in the cemetery. Early catkins strand dull branches.

The first cherry blossoms are spreading a veil of palest pink on trees in gardens and hedgerows. Velveteen buds where last week, nothing.  Five o’clock and the sun’s still not drifted down behind the headland. An evening walk becomes late afternoon again. Families and students on the beach after school and uni.

Two swans alone on Swanpool. I scan the lake for any sign of the grown-up cygnet. She’s nowhere to be seen.