BEAUTY IN ALL THINGS?

It is Friday and wet, the garden is loving it, drinking in the moisture with cracked arid soil.

We walk around our gardens and see the glories that are there but how often do we look a little closer, at the flowers and leaves that have faded. the symmetries and breaking down of such, the changes in colour with decay.

A marigold, calendula, turning to seed (to be collected).

The philadelphus and rambling rector rose moving from white to brown, the colour of decay?








Brown are the dead flowers on the deutzia, the daisy bush (olearia) and in the many leaves in early fall.

And the last of the peony flowers is done.

There are some sad leaves on the camellia and the magnolia grandiflora is doing its summer shed, scattering leaves on the path and lawn. R has told it off again for not flowering so we have at least two blooms and some buds.

The ash trees are ready to lose limbs in the first gale and the poplar does its usual dropping of redundant twigs.

POEM -

SONG FOR A TREE

(from the Norse)

Ash .....

our flesh is your wood,

you are the Tree of the World*,

you are my hammer haft,

and cleft the cure of my child.

Your flesh comes late,

goes so soon.

Ash .....

when your leaves fall

your limbs are bare and grey.

When a gale blows

your one-winged keys

spin to another day;

your black caps mourn.

Ash .....

your wood is white

and hardened in the years;

your sawn branch

cleaves well, burns long.

Summers ascend in smoke,

and that which remains ..........

*Yggdrasil

The Cumbria Book of the Year Awards have been announced -

The Bookends Prize for Literature and Poetry 

This Place I Know: An Anthology of Cumbrian Poetry edited by Kerry Darbishire, Kim Moore and Liz Nutall.

A fantastic collection - but then I would say that wouldn't I as I have a poem in there. Not the old thing above.

Enough of that - the litter of fallen petals is not without beauty, if also sadness?

Alstromeria and Rosa rugosa, the first green hips beginning to appear.




Seedheads have a symmetrical charm whether the catmint or allium.

And everywhere the papery discs of honesty wait to be scattered. As biennials they come back year on year - in our garden mostly the white variety not the pink.

In a small brown envelope in a box file I have found the seeds of Spignel Meu, Meum athmanticum, a sort of poor man's dill once gathered from the roadsides in the Eden Valley and sent on the train to London. I do not suppose they will germinate - but?

Just to be safe I have sown some dill nearby and hope I can remember which is which. The pigeons seem to take delight in pulling out the labels.

And so other flowers come out and adorn the garden - Crocosmia Lucifer in bright red.