Tish Farrell Writer

Bumble Bee Bliss & A Change In The Weather

April and it’s all change. On Saturday I was whinging about the snow that had invaded our early morning landscape. By Sunday we were sitting coatless on Benthall Hall’s tea room terrace, and consuming carrot cake and hot chocolate with the sun on our faces. It was February when were last there, and grey and stormy, with no possibility of sitting outside. Now we were in danger of overheating with a nice grey hen pootling around our feet, and the air filled with bee-hum. Later, when we ambled around the gardens, we came upon these newly opened rhododendron flowers and a very happy bumble bee. To say it was gorging itself is an understatement. Up to its armpits in pollen it was. Food at last. Bzzzzzzz.

Check in at Cee’s Flower of the Day for more floral displays.

The Winter Walker

You can step back through time on Wenlock Edge. The trackways across the ridge-top have doubtless been trodden by itinerant traders since Stone Age times. In fact if I didn’t know that the lone figure on the path ahead of me was Graham, I might tell you that this is the shade of a six thousand year-old stone axe merchant, or a four thousand year-old Bronze Age smith. Or closer to our time, say two thousand two hundred years ago, it could be an Iron Age farmer trekking through the woods.

There are also traces of Roman farms either side the Edge, and from the Middle Ages until modern times the limestone from which the Edge is formed would have been quarried for building and for iron making, and also burned in kilns to make lime mortar and fertilizer. And then there is the 400 million year geological history of the Edge itself – starting in times before fish had evolved, let alone mammals. (I won’t mention the four foot long giant water scorpions that lived back then).

But landscape as a portal to the past – it’s an intriguing notion.

This week at Black & White Sunday Paula’s guest, Lisa Dorenfest, gives us the theme of ONE. Please go and see her stunning photo, and Paula’s own response to the challenge.

Oh, my love’s like a red, red…radish? Or the joy of growing one’s own dinner

Even if I say so myself, with radishes as beautiful as these, you can see why Mother of Rapunzel so craved them that she sent poor Father of Rapunzel scrabbling over the witch woman’s garden wall on nightly radish-scrumping missions.

We all know what trouble that led to, and hopefully there will be no similar repercussions (whether the enforced letting down of over-long hair from tall towers or the scratching out of princely eyes ) from eating these dear little Cherry Belle radishes. Because eaten them we have. They took pride of place in the salad that accompanied Friday night’s dinner.

And the secret of this particularly successful, if small-scale production, was to grow them in a large plastic flower pot inside my allotment polytunnel. You can see them growing in the bottom left-hand corner, along with the component parts of many other future dinners:

This week at the Daily Post photo challenge the theme is:
Dinnertime

Apologies to Robert Burns for the radish intrusion.

Also I don’t think Jude has yet featured radishes in her April garden close-ups challenge.

Snow in April?

This was the view from my office window at 6 a.m. this morning. Flurries of snow and rooks. Snow-capped old privies. And cold. Brrrrrr. Not April showers as we usually know them. May your Saturday be warmer.

Passing Glory ~ Three Old Roses

This lovely rose grows up the wall in our back garden. Please meet Gloire de Dijon, also known less picturesquely in English as Old Glory. It’s a cross between an unknown tea rose and Souvenir de la Malmaison, an old Bourbon rose, and was introduced to the world by one Pierre Jacotot in 1853. He lived in Dijon, France, a place also famous for its mustard.

When the rose is fully opened it has dense whorls of pale peachy-pink petals that change colour as they age. Their scent is mesmerizing – notes of clove and jasmine that transport me back to Zanzibar where jasmine sprigs were nightly placed beside our plates at the hotel where we ate dinner.

And once the roses have passed their best, even dead-heading them is a delight – crushing fading petals between my hands, inhaling their last fragrance that also soaks into the skin, and can be smelled for hours.

Like Sue Judd at WordsVisual, I’m drawn to the aesthetic of decaying plant life. I think there is great beauty here – these lingering shades of erstwhile glory.

Thursday’s Special: Three of a kind

Please visit Paula to see her own lovely study for this challenge. And definitely go and see Sue Judd’s stunning daffodil study at the link above

A Pattern For Writers? (Safety note: No spiders included)

The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is for the foundation of the art of literature.

So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in The Art of Writing. You can download the full text in various formats at this link.

Anyway I’ve taken the liberty of adding a visual aid to go with the quote so we writers can be absolutely clear about what we are supposed to be aiming for.

Actually for me this image says more about the snaggled webs that are my thought processes – all sorts of knotty, misshapen bits, unwanted intrusions, and many dropped stitches. Oh yes, and also fog-bound. And if you look at the photo with X-ray eyes you will just make out a more finely woven web overlapping the larger web – their centres more or less aligned in the upper third of the image. I’m good at doing that too – getting two separate works mixed up with each other so they are impossible to pull apart. So today, you can tell, the writing has not been going well – all hitched up and back-to-front, and too many projects stitched in one.

But as I said – it’s something to aim for – this sensuous, logical web. And the ‘do-over’ is ever an option. Time to unravel the messy bits then, re-string the loom and get weaving. And to all fellow writers out there – may your threads remain untangled and the elegant and pregnant texture be with you.

P.S. I always find myself fascinated by the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson was a rebel writer, broken away (in the face of domineering paternal ambition) from a dynasty of obsessive compulsive, but oh so intrepid, and brilliant lighthouse builders. I feel this may tell us something important about his work.

This web is also for Jude at The Earth Laughs In Flowers because she says she likes webs. She is looking for macro and close-up garden photos this month.

Black & White Sunday: Delicate

“There’s magic in the web of it”

The quote is from Shakespeare’s play Othello. And the web is from a shady corner in my garden, captured on a foggy morning last autumn. It’s also my interpretation for this week’s Black & White Challenge at At Lost in Translation. Paula is inspiring us towards a delicate frame of mind.

Black & White Sunday: Delicate

Nice By Night ~ Hotel Negresco

“If only I were at Nice, I would recover.”

So said Queen Victoria on her deathbed in 1901. She has a point. Who would not feel better after a stroll along La Promenade des Anglais, one’s gaze filled with the perfect Côte d’Azur blue of the La Baie des Anges. For a monarch, who had made a career of mourning the death of her consort, Prince Albert, Nice was the one place where she sparked into life. She would travel there under the name of Lady Balmoral, and go exploring the backstreets of Nice in a donkey cart. The Hotel Negresco, however, was after her time, opened in 1913. It dominates the La Promenade des Anglais. Past guests include Salvador Dali, Princess Grace of Monaco, Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ava Gardner, and Edith Piaf. This night shot looking up to the characteristic terracotta cupola, and the cool blue of the illuminated sign, somehow sums up the Nice-ness of Nice.

Thursday’s Special

This week Paula’s guest is Cardinal Guzman. He challenges us to post some night photography, and provides lots of useful tips.

Heading For The Light ~ Wenlock’s Linden Walk In Winter

I consider myself well blessed to have this avenue of venerable lime trees within a stone’s throw of my house. The Linden Walk is one of Much Wenlock’s treasures. The limes on the right were planted in October 1869 by the town’s physician and philanthropist, Dr. William Penny Brookes. He apparently had help from his friends to do the job. Forty two trees were planted and forty two trees still thrive. Thank you Dr. Brookes.

The limes on the left are possibly older, and our local tree expert surmises that they may have been planted by the railway company in 1860-ish to demarcate the railway line when it first arrived in Wenlock. Dr. Brooks was a prime mover in bringing the railway to town. It’s only a pity he can’t bring it back to us.

The avenue forms the southerly boundary of the Gaskell aka Linden Field, where from the 1850s Dr. Brooks held the Annual Wenlock Olympian Games, an event of his devising for improving the health and wellbeing of the general populace of Wenlock and beyond. He even designed the ornate medals and paid for them himself. And it was these games that went on to inspire and inform the modern Olympic Movement. A crown of laurels to you, Dr. Brookes.

The good news is that, according to an international lime tree specialist, who was brought in to inspect them, this avenue has another good century and a half of life left in it – as long as we continue to care for it. I’m sure we will.

In this winter view, taken in Lumix monochrome mode, the walk looks very mysterious. In summer, though, it is so flush with leaf vigour and the soothing notes of linden blossom that you can walk beneath the trees and get high as kite: so much juice and joy – to misquote Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Over at Paula’s Black & White Sunday the theme is ‘convergence’. Please go and see her work, and others’ converging interpretations.

Views From The Silurian Sea

I dare say the farm fields were neither so large nor so orderly when Africa explorer, ‘Livingstone-I-presume’, Henry Morton Stanley looked out on this Shropshire landscape. For looked at it he would have when he came as a guest to The Abbey home of the Milnes-Gaskells of Much Wenlock. Stanley’s hosts were enthusiastic tour guides and brought all their visitors to Wenlock Edge to admire the view.

Those of you who come here often will know that Wenlock Edge is an 18-mile limestone ridge that runs across southern Shropshire. It is very much a local landmark, and its geology is of international scientific interest. The Edge as we know it now was formed by the uptilt of fossilized strata that were once the bed of the Silurian Sea.

Some 400 million years ago, this shallow tropical sea, that pre-dated even the advent of fish, and long before terrestrial life had evolved, once lay off East Africa near today’s Comoros Islands. You can find out more about it in an earlier post: Old Stones of Wenlock: Repurposing the Silurian Sea

On Sunday I posted an African landscape. Today is my ‘Out of Africa’ landscape, both of itself (because this chunk of Britain once lay in African waters), and on account of the photographer (that would be me) who has yet to get over leaving that continent.

But it goes to show how landscape intimately affects who we are, both physically and spiritually. It feeds our imagination, and shapes the lives we lead in a multitude of ways. Its resources may provide the basis for our livelihoods, and will have shaped communities and culture over countless generations before us. If we fail to value it, we will ultimately lose the best of ourselves, our true heritage. In Shropshire we owe great thanks to the National Trust and Shropshire Hills Area Of Outstanding Beauty, organizations that strive to creatively engage and reconnect people with the earth beneath their feet, and the natural beauty around them. More power to their purpose.

Day 7 of my Nature Photo Challenge shots. Thanks once more to Anna at Una Vista di San Fermo who started me off on this jaunt.

And view 2 in the Daily Post weekly photo challenge: Landscape