Golden lights and green shadows

I sat down (at the new table!) to write this tonight, but instead ended up on Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl) off the coast of Co. Kerry. A bare rock pointing to heaven in the midst of wild Atlantic foam, a place where monks settled in the sixth century in what for them was the very edge of the known world. A place that's home now to seabirds of all sorts: puffins, guillemots, gannets, gulls of course, and manx shearwater who every year make the long journey from the east coast of South America to this tiny rock in the Atlantic. As I sat here this evening, I accompanied Luke Clancy and Chris Watson on their journey to the Skelligs to record the sounds and calls and cries of the seabirds, above the roar of the Atlantic swell. You can hear all this--as well as stories of lighthouse keepers, poets and archaeologists and, of course, the monks--right here. If you can make the time to listen online or download the podcast, do - treat yourself. This is radio at its very best, radio as we'd want it to be more often, creating vivid pictures with words and sounds, pulling you in to its world. Brilliant.

We made a shorter journey earlier today when we went to Cloon Oak Glen in Co. Wicklow. The glen was once home to a royal oak forest (from, I think, the 13th century onwards) but had been hugely diminished by the end of the 19th century, although in the early 20th century, J.M. Synge was still able to write:

Iz turns her back on poetry: To the Oaks of Glencree, J.M. Synge

The glen is home now to a very young oak forest, not even 25 years old, that was planted by Crann and Coillte in a joint venture, with sponsorship from private citizens. It's a quiet place, full of Synge's golden lights and green shadows, though not quite as he would have seen them, but there's hope that someone some day will sit in that same light again under old and venerable oaks. Even now it's a lovely place to be, especially on a warm autumn day.

Young oak and autumn light

This year's growth and ripening berries on wild holly in the glen

Gnarly bark of an old ash tree

At home, the work in the garden this week has been very pleasant indeed - harvesting tomatoes as we need them, and re-potting some beautiful bamboos. One of the varieties of tomatoes I planted this year is a plum tomato; it's nothing fancy, I got it in the local garden centre as a seedling, but I'll certainly give it a go again next year, it makes lovely sauce.

Plum tomatoes, still ripening in the lovely late Autumn weather

The bamboos we got from a job that B did for a very well-known grower, and what a great barter: beautiful photographs of all sorts of bamboos, grasses and the nursery itself, in exchange for some rather nice bamboos - Fargesia jiuzhaigou and Phyllostachys nigra (Black Bamboo) to name just two. I'm not sure they'll get enough sunlight where they are at the moment, but if we move them around perhaps it'll be okay. Their job at the moment is act as an external curtain outside the large window and back door. Since I lose the will to live every time I enter a home furnishing or textile shop, I have come around to admitting (after five years of looking out at the darkness all winter) that I'm never going to get a blind or curtains for that window, and since I love plants, well why not use them as a screen instead. Much nicer and a damn sight cheaper, especially when they're an exchange. Let's hope they settle in well.

Bamboo heaven - the Fargesia jiuzhaigou on the left are the outdoor 'curtain'

One other small job I did this week was prepare the early winter flowers for Da's grave. He'd have loved the tiny violas. Now that they've settled in, I'll move them to his grave in the coming week.

Winter colour for Da's grave

In a few weeks, this blog will have been on the go for two years. Each week for those two years I've posted some sort of log ... some long, some short, some with nice pics, some not. What I set out to do with this blog was a combination of things I suppose: I wanted to keep some sort of record of what was going on in the garden and beyond its narrow walls; I wanted to convey some of the wonder I think we can all find in the quotidian, if only we choose or remember to look and to see; I wanted to convey to my two lovely sons some of the things that are important to me, that are not really relevant to them now, but may be in years to come; I wanted to see if I could stick to the discipline of making a weblog entry every week; I wanted to flex the writing muscle a bit.

In the two years I think I've accomplished some of what I set out to do, some of the time. But I worry now that the words are running out. Could this be that since I'm spending more of my (precious) 'spare' time drawing and thinking in a visual way that I'm finding the words harder to find? Could it be also that any seasonal blog is going to start repeating itself, all the more so when it's coming from a small space, and maybe that's just not satisfying? And then there's the fact that this is a bit of a duck-billed platypus of a blog: it's not about one thing, it's about bits and pieces--my garden, the natural world, poems, music, science, drawing--and so it hasn't found its niche really. So-o-o, I'm wondering whether I shall continue. Over the next few weeks as I finish out the two years, I'll have a bit of a think about it.

Have a good week all.