Wednesday 29 August 2018

Wonderful evenings at Wakehurst Place



The sun is setting. It is orange-gold and so low, piercing the cloud. In the lower meadows, cut and now lush green, two full-grown foxes chase each other making darts and feints at each other in the dusk and from n a tree somewhere down the headgeline I hear the hiss-like rasp of an owl calling for food.

I sit on a warm wooden round seat with the words inscribed on it “No time to see...” except for once I have got time, and I am very lucky to see a white shape floating a little awkwardly over the long grass and the owl lands on a fence post, calling. It’s back to me it is the same colour of the August grass, and now it turns its face to me it is a white glow.  Then it bobs up across the grass and flies up into the dark safety of an oak to call again for food.

A tawny wails briefly, hoarsely almost from the wood. Out in front a kestrel slides across the skyline and into the trees and  mistle thrushes erupt, chattering angrily. Then again all is still, the air is cool, and soft, on every horizon I see the shape of a redwood. This meadow is flowered, seeding, quiet. And I muse on how to best describe the sound of the young owl: it is the bristles of a stiff yard brush on a rain-washed road; it is laboured wheezing; it is each puffing up of a balloon, the hunger growing; it is the slow monotony of the sharpening of a hunger for many mice; it is the spray of a paint can drawing a line from here to tomorrows’ night; it is the tree, breathing, heavy with summer; it is the sound of the rolling sea in the shore-side rocks: so many attempts and yet each feels like is falls so far short of the actual sound. Deep in the wood now I hear the foxes bark; it is dark and not yet 9 o’clock. The adult owl is hunting the field, ghostly: I watch it until I cannot see it’s pale shape any longer. The fox barks, the fox barks, and once more as I leave the silhouetted trees and the resin-rich night-black air. 



Monday 5 March 2018

'The Peace of the Wild Things'

"I come into the peace of wild things.." is my favourite line from this fantastic poem by Wendell Berry, and you can hear his gorgeous reading of it hereThe Peace of Wild Things. The space and emotion in his voice takes me back to the wild places and 'wild things' in Canada, and nearly 18 months on, I still dream of the magic of that month on the edge of forest and Great Lake up on the Bruce Peninsula, stepping over snakes and hearing the strange morning cries of cranes in the half-dark dawning. And of those evening journeys, paddling out into the basin after the long day was done and resting there awhile, watching and listening, watching two moons and the pushed ripple of a beaver along the shore swimming out to gnaw holes in the deep blue dusk.


Wingfield Basin, Bruce Peninsula, 2016