Cornflower

October

    "For much of October we can play at autumn. We get golden sunlight, tapestry-like hillsides, morning mists, all without any great drop in temperature: a gentle slide into everything good about autumn. We light the fire because we can, because it's October, not because we are so cold that we have to. The countryside is ravishing, and ripening before our eyes, every hedgerow glistening with lipstick-red hips and purple elderberries, hazelnuts and walnuts and glossy sweet chestnuts in their hedgehog casings, every tree a different shade. The year's spiders are now fully grown, and are suddenly everywhere, stretching their webs over hedges and across the garden path, the fine strands breaking across your face each morning.

    Gather in nuts and logs and final crops, because towards the end of the month things start to feel more serious. Frosts arrive and the clocks go back, and we remember what this ripening is all about. The Anglo-Saxons called this month Winterfylleth, a word composed of 'winter' and 'full moon', and they thought that winter began on October's full moon, which falls this year on the 24th. Prematurely pessimistic, perhaps, but night and cold are slowly becoming dominant."

    From The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2018 by Lia Leendertz.

                                                    ~

    Suitably autumnal (blackberry, raspberry, and fig) frangipane tarts from a new and excellent local discovery, The Pastry Section in Edinburgh's Stockbridge, near Armstrong the fishmonger. If you should go there, look out especially for the sublime Persian love cakes (devoured before I could photograph them).

On my desk today

    A very good novel.

    An unusual variety of apple - Irish Peach (it has a peachy scent and a good flavour) - from a friend's garden.

    All scoffed now, Blueberry Crumbles, recipe from The Secret Herb Garden:

NB I used approximately half and half wholemeal flour and plain, perhaps 100g less sugar than specified, and twice the amount of cinnamon.

Ingredients

• 375g Plain Flour
• 200g Caster Sugar
• 1tsp Baking Powder
• 200g Butter
• 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
• 1 Egg
• 600g Blueberries (or any berries)
• 100g Sugar
• 1tbsp Cornflour

Method - 20 minutes preparation, 45 minutes Cooking

• Mix Plain Flour, Caster Sugar, Baking Powder & Cinnamon together with a hand-held whisk.
• Add butter and work in with your hands until you obtain fine crumbs. Then add egg & mix thoroughly.
• In another bowl, mix the blueberries, the sugar and the cornflour.
• Line your tray with parchment and place half of the crumble dough at the bottom, pressing it down.
• Place the blueberries, sugar and cornflour evenly.
• Top with the rest of the crumbs and bake @ 190°C for approx. 45 minutes

The small things

   

    "[Lucilla] tried very hard to teach her grandchildren how to extract the last drop of beauty out of all the small things of life, words and scents and sounds. Many little joys, weighed against the few heavy griefs of existence, could give some sort of balance to the scales and preserve the sanity of life."

    There is more on Lucilla here.

Little acorns

    If you're in Edinburgh over the next six or seven weeks, do visit The Lost Words exhibition at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden.

    I'm sure you're already familiar with the book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris which "celebrates the relationship between language and the living world". A fair number of its artworks are included in the show, each subject being treated in three ways: an "absence", an icon, and a contextual piece, showing "things that are missing and things that are hidden, [...] absences and appearances". Run your tongue around the "spells" and linger on the images, but if - like me - you are unnerved by large pictures of certain birds (magpie and raven, for instance), you should be fine enough in the gallery but turn the book's pages with care!

White lilac

    "Blossom is a sort of visual helium."

    Charlie Hart, Skymeadow: Notes from an English Gardener.

    Syringa vulgaris 'Madame Lemoine'.

Quickening

   

    "It is a moment of quickening, of rebirth. The old, lovely story: life surging back, despite everything, once again. However spring finds you - birdsong, blossom or spawn - it is a signal: the earth turning its ancient face back to the sun."

    Melissa Harrison, Spring: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons.

Learn something

    " 'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world works and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'

    This is the trick [...] There are too many self-help guides that say: get fit, lose weight, make friends, find a hobby, revamp your wardrobe. Clear the clutter to clear your mind. Eat right - and right is always avocado, chia and other whatnot - to 'improve your mood'.

    Better that they should say: feed your mind. Learn something, read something, see something new: a painting, a church, a bird, a rose garden, a park, a monument, a castle moat white with swans and hidden perch, a mews of hooded merlins, an elephant with ivory tusks and a palanquin throne on his back. Fill your thoughts with the world and what wags it. Plant roses so that thistles may not grow. Be as curious as you were as a child, as curious as the Wart, helping himself to Merlyn's breakfast and gasping: 'Oh, I love the mustard-pot! Wherever did you get it?' "

    Laura Freeman quoting T.H. White's The Once and Future King in The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite.

Skirl away, lassie

    

    "Mary Frances, having reconciled me to olive oil, did something greater still: she won me over to butter. It was her skirling* that did it. Now, when I make eggs, I cut my measure of butter (Mary Frances would probably still think me very stingy) and skirl it in the base of the pan, making it figure-skate over the surface. And I think of her skirling in the kitchen at Marseilles in bare feet on the red-tiled floor, with pots of geraniums on the window ledges and the mistral blowing outside."

    Laura Freeman, The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite.    

    Vuillard, At Clayes, Geranium on a Blue Table in front of the Window.

    *Scroll down to I.8

February

   "February is an ascetic little month. Cold, short and dark, many of its rituals - Imbolc, Candlemas, Lent - revolve around absence, purging and fasting. Its birthstone, amethyst, symbolises piety and humility. Even the name February comes from februum, Latin for purification, the root - februo - meaning 'I purify by sacrifice'. Fun old February. Because of its short length it is the only month that can pass without a full moon, and this year it does exactly this, so even the long nights are not lit up by the sparkling full winter moon. In all of this it can feel like a month of self-denial and of suspension of activity, a time to tuck up indoors and wait for warmer days, a pause for contemplation before the hustle and renewal of the next few months.

    But look and you will see sure signs that nothing stands still, even - or perhaps especially - in February. In the far north of the country the day lengthens by a full two hours by the end of the month, and everywhere there are little signs of life returning, unable to resist the turning of the year even when breath is cloudy and ground solid. And as light returns so does the urge to sow and grow, to start off the year's cycles, and to engage with the still-weak but strengthening sun. The temptation to hibernate may still be strong, but by the end of the month a spring-like hopefulness starts to win out."

    From The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2018 by Lia Leendertz.

Owlish

    " ... he is subtext, something present but unseen."

    So says John Lewis-Stempel of the owl, subject of this charming little book of owlish facts, history, and observations.

    Did you know that there have been owls in Britain for a million years? That Florence Nightingale had a pet owl, Athena, now embalmed and in residence in her museum (where you can buy a finger puppet)? That the presence of owls is "a benediction on the land" for what it says about the health of the ecosystem? That the collective noun for owls - other than 'parliament' - is a 'stare'? There's more to the "sage in feathers" than meets the eye.

    The suitably strigine wool, by the way, is 'Owl' by Uschitita, found at Be Inspired Fibres.

A Snow Queen's Kingdom

    "The weeks dragged on, through February and far into March. Just before the end, as a grand finale, we had a fog, causing a silver frost. I have never known anything more beautiful and enchanted and terrible than our wood in the murderous grip of that silver frost. Every branch, every twig was sheathed in many times its own thickness of clear ice. When the wind blew, the branches rang against each other making a cold-sweet music as of glass bells, while after dark, under a full moon, the wood was full of shifting points of light, as though whole constellations of stars had fallen out of the frosty sky to become entangled in those strange ghost-pale branches. It was Hans Andersen, a Snow Queen's Kingdom with splinters of death at its heart."

    The harsh winter of 1947, from Rosemary Sutcliff's Blue Remembered Hills (post on it here).

New Year wishes

    A look back at my year via the so-called 'best nine' Instagram pictures, and gardens seem to be a theme!

    From the top, left to right:

    my garden in May; Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons at dusk; Oxford Botanic Garden;

    Kellie Castle, Fife; reading in the greenhouse on a rainy day; socks and Shakespeare;

    Spring colours - book and wool; St. Mary's Pleasance, Haddington; Oxford again.

    My thanks to you for visiting here (and here), and for your kind, informed, helpful comments - it's a pleasure to have you stop by.

    All the best to you in 2018!

Monty ...

     ... has a new website.

    And look in the books section and in addition to Paradise Gardens which will be out in the spring (the television series starts in January), you'll see that on the way is a book on dogs and human health, and the first part of his memoirs.

    Ladies, form an orderly queue.

Use your yarn as ink

    "I give you permission to write in the margins of your knitting. Make your mark by slipping stitches and watch the colour changes flow. Use the stitches as you would words. Use your yarn as ink."

    Just arrived, my backer's copy of Karie Westermann's new book This Thing of Paper. "Drawing fascinating parallels between two enduring forms of self-expression, this book will strike a chord with book lovers, readers, and knitters everywhere." Very much so, I'd say.

 

Edited to add: if you want a copy don't delay, as pre-Christmas orders end tomorrow (the 1st. of December).

But: as I write, Meadow Yarn have some.

To the high hills

    So sorry to hear today of the death of Jill Barklem, creator of the much-loved Brambly Hedge books.