Querulous rooks

They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

Derek Mahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 

Travels this summer brought us to friends in Kilkenny, Westmeath and Donegal. In the 'van we went to Clare and Tipperary. In spite of the rather awful summer, the journeys--short and all as they were--brought home to us once again what a lovely country we live in. Though it's a country that sadly shows traces of rural de-population at many's the turn.

Close to our friends' house in Kilkenny, a farm lies deserted, left to someone who won't be living there. Sheds crumble and weeds take hold, and always the rooks circle through and around the spreading oaks and high sycamores, landing in tattered raucous groups only to rise again. The shed brought to mind Derek Mahon's well-known poem. I don't understand the depths of some of Mahon's work, but he has written many beautiful and accessible poems, some of which work on many levels and resonate even for those of us who don't have a classical education or a well rounded literary background. His poems will turn up here again for sure.

Deserted farmyard, midsummer

Disused shed, midsummer

You'll hear some rooks here as well as blackbirds et al. Fintan O'Brien again. Great stuff. 

eh... did I say summer?

Iz keeping watch as one of her humans disappears into the sea (Donegal)

Spot the schauzer - Burren Karst (Clare)

It wasn't all gloom - there were some sunny days; view from a campsite in Co. Clare

Glen of Aherlow (Tipperary), seen from a walk near another campsite

The reason we went to Tipperary was to visit Birdhill Nurseries to see the original of Betula utilis, var. jacquemontii 'White Light' (I hope I have that right). It's one of the plants that features in the new project being run by the ISBA, this time in conjunction with the Irish Garden Plant Society. A series of Irish heritage plants will be celebrated in paintings and words and brought together in a book and exhibition next year. I was assigned the birch and I'm delighted and daunted. The tree is a cross between B. jacquemontii and B. costata, with the beautiful white bark of the former and the autumn colour of the latter. To my eye, 'White Light' also seems to have more plentiful and more 'stretched out' lenticels on the bark than the jacquemontii has (I've three jacquemontiis in my front garden, so I've something to compare with!).

We found Birdhill Nurseries without too much trouble but only to discover that, sadly, John Buckley died just over a year ago. But Mrs Buckley very kindly welcomed us to the garden and let us stay to photograph and sketch the tree (and others in the garden), which we did. In the rain. I ended up with a few very spattered sketchbook pages and some very rough sketches. Mrs B also let us take away some small branches with leaves as well as some of the beautiful bark and said we could come back any time to check up on it. I've found this before and it was lovely to discover it again: when you're doing a project like this, so-o-o many people are kind and interested and helpful. I've had another member of the IGPS posting photos of his 'White Light' birch (thanks PT!) and I know I've an open invitation to visit the tree any time. Lovely stuff.

So, have I been making good use of all this good will? The rolls of bark are still on my desk, I've drawn the leaves and branches. I've done some messing about with colours. And I've hassled other artists (at the ISBA support days in the Bots) about composition. Now all that's left is the Terror! I'm going to have to, you know, do a portrait of the tree.
Nervous. Very nervous.

Starting to look at colours

Practising on Bristol Board

Trying out bark sketches on Fabriano paper

Sketch sketch sketch 

And again on the Fabriano paper

Did I mention very nervous?

Okay, enough of the nerves; I'll finish with a smile:

Oh, was it only me who found it funny? You aren't rocking with laughter; this should be slated; you don't give a schist; if you're laughing, it's just to be gneiss?

Sorry :-)

Go well all.

Blue hills and a buttermilk sky

Out there in the real world I asked a friend (and loyal reader of the blog) recently if I should get back to blogging and she said yes... Was she was just being nice? Quite possibly, but I took it on face value (thanks lb!).

I'd been thinking about the blog quite a bit over the summer: on the one hand there's been a lot of 'oh I'd love to mention that garden/plant/hillside/fox-sighting in the blog'; but on the other it has been nice just letting myself enjoy the various sights, sounds, sensations without having to record and share. Though if truth be told, I've been sharing it via facebook. It's the lazy woman's way: just select the phone pic and share. And yes, there's an awful lot of sharing going on in here on t'internet, so why add to it by getting back to the blog? Partly because I've enjoyed the diary aspect of it; and the discipline of it was fun when I started: I wanted to prove to myself that I could write weekly and did for two years. It also takes more commitment than pressing 'share' on a phone pic and that's not a bad thing.

But I'd become concerned that the blog was getting too repetitive: I set out to show that a small garden and an interest in nature can provide lots of wonder, and they do. The problem with confining myself to just those is the fear that things become too repetitive (in the garden's case) or they carry the expectation of being too depressing (in the case of writing about nature): loss of biodiversity, pollution, climate change, destruction of our peatlands... all of these things inevitably come to light once you take an interest in the natural world and to ignore those issues as I have seems Pollyanna-ish, but honestly I get exhausted by so much gloom.

Always I've wanted to share some sense of wonder, some sense of exploration. Sometimes the exploration is of nature and gardens, sometimes of place, sometimes of trying out new things such as drawing. So, I'll continue with those but overall, this will be a mixed bag. It is a bit risky: so many blogs seem to be very focused on Just One Thing (gardens or plants or drawing/painting). Those who focus on the one thing are then very good at that thing, so the theory goes, and the readership builds up accordingly. But my mind is a bit like a pondskater on a summer's evening, dashing from one place to the next, not even scratching the surface. I can't stay on just one thing: while I admire the skill and knowledge of those who do, it's not for me. I get entranced by a drawing and then I get pulled into a poem. I am delighted by a piece of music and then I marvel at birdsong. 'Nature' is the common thread to much of it, though not all.

So, if you come along for the ride, I hope you enjoy it, but I can't guarantee it will interest you *all* of the time; I only hope you'll find something some of the time that causes you to pause for thought. Thanks dear readers.

Here's a start then:

Drawing 

by Sarah Simblet, from the New Sylva; you can find more here.

A diary bit

It was cycling through the suburbs only a week or two ago, on my way home from work, that the blog came to the fore yet again. Even in the 'burbs, the surroundings can be delightful: on that evening, the Dublin mountains (hills really) were a gorgeous violet-indigo blue and had a pale buttermilk sky behind as the sun had just set. Ah Autumn!

While enjoying the colours, the contrast, the hills pulling my mind out and away from the traffic, the noise and the fumes, my mind immediately also connected to a song, and I thought the blog would be a nice place to record all that.

Some music

It was of course the buttermilk sky that brought this song into my head, although it was the wonderful Freddie White, not Mr Carmichael, who was singing in my head. While searching for the song, I found this next piece of music which is very different, but lovely too; take some time out (it's just over three minutes) and have a listen while you think of some blue hills you know with a pale sky behind.

The birdsong:

While searching on soundcloud, I found recordings by this man, an Irish cabinetmaker who loves to record birdsong. How serendipitous and great is that? Do you have time to take 10 more minutes out? Immerse yourself in the night song of Thrush Nightingales in Estonia:

The gardens:

After what can most charitably be described as an indifferent summer, we've had a wonderfully mild autumn. The colours are still beautiful; here's how my own patch looked last weekend:

The garden in autumn -- asters, sedums, agapanthus and grasses. Oh, and a photo-bombing Verbena bonariensis...

And a rather more expert gardener looks after this:

Caher Bridge garden in August

Exploring:

We finally got a campervan: old and much loved. We've been gallivanting a bit:

The van in the Wicklow hills. Beautiful autumn weather and the heather in bloom. 

And I've been exploring with ink. Lordie, drawing is hard enough, but with ink, the safety net of the trusty eraser is gone! Scary but fun once I stopped worrying. I just go for it and see what happens, with ballpoint pens, ink, felt-tips, whatever. All part of the #inktober meme. Yes, the internet can be an okay place. 

Spot-the-schnauzer sketches done with metal nibs in ecoline

Nicandra physalodes, also in ecoline, brush and pen

See you here again soon I hope. 

The arty one

Some of you more dedicated readers (bless you) will know that drawing is one of my current interests - as well as gardens, plants, natural history, words. I've been spending the last few months (though only for a few hours a week) getting into some of the basics of drawing, with the help of Sam Horler at The Drawing Studio and the very classical Bargue Cours de Dessin.

I have been enjoying it enormously, which is not to say that there haven't been moments of teeth-grinding frustration... But all in all, the learning has been great and the taking time out to wield a pencil with some sort of serious intent has been very satisfying. It's a real 'in the zone' activity for me, which is wonderful in itself. The results are mixed but my hope is that it will help me draw better the things I love. Time will tell!

So, here's what I've been up to during this time of very traditional and classical training, it's a mixed bag of drawings and some of the things I see in these drawings make me wince a bit on looking at them now, but that's all part of the process. Dodgy phone pics all, but you'll get a sense of what has been going on.

The planty one

April comes and it's as though Nature has flipped a switch. Within a couple of weeks the garden and the woods have started to, well, burgeon is really the only word.

Back in February, I gathered these two photos together to remind myself that winter *would* eventually yield to spring and then to summer.

All change! Knocksink wood in winter and summer

But I don't need that reassurance now, the change is here ...

Malus ... perfect.

This year, I (and some helpers, thank you guys) did a lot of work simply splitting and moving things around in the garden. It's the sort of thing that more committed gardeners do regularly: splitting the perennials, ringing the changes in different parts of the garden, trying new things out. But it's really only over the last year or so that I feel I now have the time to do this sort of thing. And I'm loving it.

So: all the plants in and around the witch hazel and the Enkianthus in the back garden (one of my 'woodland' patches) were split and shifted around last autumn and this spring. The birches in the front garden now have an array of bleeding heart, Smilicina/Maianthemum and Pachyphragma macrophylla mixing in with all the spring bulbs that are lighting up that space too: narcissi and daffodils, anemones, scillas, that sort of thing... I love the space now and am hoping that the interest will continue with alliums, lilies and campion throughout the summer.

Spring under the birches in the front garden

Earlier in the spring I went to the annual GLDA seminar (thanks B!), and had a most enjoyable day listening to such erudite speakers as Thomas Rainer and Verney Naylor. I was a bit disappointed with the level of debate on the day, but the talks themselves were thoughtful and inspiring, even if the scale of the some of the work (e.g. Keith Wiley's Wildside Garden and Le Jardin Plume) was so daunting. My own patch looked very, very tiny on my return home. (Have a look at Le Jardin Plume: *one* of their squares is the same size as half of my back garden). Interesting thing too: since I've used Valentia pebbles and flags in my garden I asked B to paint the wooden fence--that he put up a couple of summers ago--what I thought would be a low-key purplish-slate colour. Here it is, in March, behind the rather bare and recently re-organised bed.

Hmm, not sure about the colour of that fence...

I came home that day, fresh from seeing recommendations from Verney that the perfect background for plants, to contrast well with their green, is a sort of red ochre. She showed many lovely images that proved her point. But the paint we had chosen looked a much more bluey purple than I imagined and I was more than a bit taken aback. I went through the 'oh for godsake how on earth can I imagine I should be let loose in a garden at all, I can't even get a background colour right' thing. But all was not lost... a fellow gardener (and architect) suggested that at these latitudes the cooler colours are a better backdrop and as spring has worked its magic and the plants have grown at the foot of and in front of the fence I've come to like it better. We'll see how it works as time goes on. Better than bare breeze blocks anyway. Here it is today:

Fence settling in 1...

Fence settling in 2...

Apologies for the pics, btw, they're just phone ones since my camera is being mended at the moment.

In other plant news, the Dublin and Ulster Shows of the Alpine Garden Society have been and gone. Some of my plants even did well at both shows (in the Novices section, natch): I got some firsts at both shows as well as a couple of thirds at the Dublin one.

Here's a beautiful tulip that won me a First at the Ulster Group AGS show:

My Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha (photo by catchlight.ie)

I also put a picture in the Artistic Section in both shows this year and it came first in both!

There are always lots of amazing plants at these shows: the results of painstaking effort on the part of their growers and nurterers. Here's one that won the much-coveted Farrer medal (well done Val!). It's Draba longisilqua, and is probably the parent of the Draba I was kindly given by another AGS expert a couple of years ago. Mine is still alive, but there hasn't been a single flower on it yet this year. Go figure!

Draba longisiliqua, grown by Val Keegan, winner of the AGS Farrer Medal in Dublin, April 2015

Spring weather has been a mixed bag here and this weekend was typical - sunny and showery; sunny and cold. A wet Saturday morning in Mount Usher gardens meant a quiet walk with few people around; not the best weather for visiting a garden, but even with the rain, there were moments of beauty:

Intricacies of a beech hedge in Mount Usher gardens

Fallen blossom in a rill in Mount Usher gardens

Go well all.