FOCUSING -IN

 

FOCUSING –IN .

A lifetime of itchy feet, indulged in the past fifty years by frequent travel, now has to be radically modified. Not that I don’t appreciate the endlessly varied landscapes of this country, nor even our immediate home patch; after all, I cut my teeth in the English countryside. But I have always, after settling back home for a few months, have again had the overwhelming urge either to revisit favourite places  or to investigate new ones. In the past, this was always followed up with plans, preparations, and departures.

Now, the urge has to be translated into sessions of gardening or a short officially-allowed walk. The focus is close-up, the attention on familiar things sharpened. Just wait a minute! Pause, look carefully, listen, think!  There is always something new to be noticed, or the already-known to be appreciated more fully with sharpened senses.

 

 

My earliest flower memory is of primroses and particularly of their sweet demure fragrance. This must be from family holidays in South Devon at Easter, seeing and picking primroses from the banks. These holidays stopped in 1939 so I can’t have been much more than three. We didn’t have primroses in our part of Hertfordshire, my home county. The delicate scent of these flowers takes me right back through my life every time I smell them now. Flawless in their simple form, humble tone rather than the more strident value of so many other yellow flowers, they were my first lesson in botany! Mum would point out the pin-eyed and thrum-eyed forms. Later I learnt that the ‘thrums are the stamens up in the top of the flower tube, ready for the pollen to be picked up by a foraging bee and transferred to the  stigma, the ‘pin eye’ on another plant, thus ensuring cross-pollination.

 

Thrum-eyed, with stamens showing.

 

Pin-eyed, with stigma showing.

 

Onions! Another smell, evocative of spring. Ramsons grow rampantly in many woods and damp places especially in the west country. To walk among them is to send the smell of mild onion into the air. The round heads of white flowers and the shiny oval leaves can be eaten in salads. They propagate madly from tiny slim bulbous offsets and once in the garden are almost impossible to get rid of. Eating them just doesn’t keep up!

 

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) or sometimes known as Wild Garlic.

 

In spring, and a sound now, the clear sweet falling cadence of a Willow Warbler, newly returned from its winter in Africa. These little greenish warblers are best differentiated from the similar Chiffchaff by their very distinctive songs. I don’t think they are as common as they used to be but we can always hear a few on the scrubby slopes of Kit Hill nearby.

Willow Warbler

 

Running water, tumbling, rushing, trickling, bubbling, gushing, roaring, crashing... so many ways of combining the sound and the ever-mesmerizing sight of moving water, from soothing to exhilarating. 

 

River Fowey, rushing down off the moor at Golitha Falls.

 Look at the delicate tracery of veins on insects’ wings. Some species can only be identified but the pattern of the veins.

A Mayfly (Green-winged Olive)

 

An Ichneumon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painted Lady Butterfly

 

 Touch is one of the most sensuous of our senses. Stroke a silky Pussy Willow catkin in the early spring. Their silvery silk shines against a blue sky. It’s only the male catkins that look like this, and only before the golden fuzz of stamens emerge from the silk. The female catkins are a knobbly greenish mass of stigmas before producing a myriad silk-born seeds which float past in a breeze like a thin mist.

 

Silky male catkins of a 'Pussy Willow'

 

 Or stroke the velvety wing feather of an owl or buzzard. The feathers have a soft furry surface designed to muffle the sound of their wing beats as they pounce on their unwary prey. 

 A delight on a dewy  morning in late summer, to find before anyone else, a harvest of new button mushrooms. The small ones still conceal the baby pink gills under the domed white cap. I like to eat them raw, savouring the delicate flavour with the almost crisp plump feeling as you bite into them.

 

Field Mushrooms

  

Taste the salt on your skin after a day’s exertion in the heat. Tropical sweat bees home in to get the salt. Tiny and black, they can be intensely annoying; they tickle but don’t sting.

All five of our senses can be harnessed in this close focusing. I feel in my bones we have another, sixth, sense that hasn’t got a name and its site is somewhere in our sensibilities if you let yourself tune in. It can crop up in all sorts of circumstances. Count the rings on a felled tree trunk. Look at the distance between them, telling a story of the good and bad years it has lived through; the history it has witnessed.

 As a child, my most vivid impression from the Natural History Museum in London was the varnished cross-section of a giant tree, showing the long history of memorable events throughout the world that this tree had lived through. 

Our local landmark, referred to as “up by the Beech Tree” clung onto the top of a high retaining bank up our lane. As the years passed, ever-bigger lorries scraped their way past, damaging its roots. Every few years the great plates of a bracket fungus Grifolia erupted from the roots. I don’t think this fungus is a killer but it may have been weakening the tree. One night coming home in the dark from a meeting, we almost ran into it. It had fallen across the lane.

 

This Spruce tree shows good steady growth as a youngster. The closer rings show steady but slower growth as it got older, as it put on more height and girth.

 

Our landmark beech tree. The discoloured area indicates some sort of stress or disease, maybe caused by the bracket fungus. The Highways men had to saw off the trunk when it fell across the lane.

 From the long life of an ancient tree to the ephemeral beauty of the sparkling crystals of hoar frost on a cold quiet morning. Just breathe on them, and they are gone. 

Seize the moment!