Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
Built 1844-48 by Richard Turner to Decimus Burton’s designs, the Palm House is Kew’s most recognisable building, having gained iconic status as the world’s most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure. —Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: History and Heritage
View slideshow on Flickr – view photos individually
I’m still slowly processing photos from last month’s trip. As with the audio podcasts, what took two weeks to record will take at least two months to polish and share. But this is why we travel, isn’t it? And I’ve enjoyed reliving the memories of those few hours in North London’s Highgate Cemetery, a place devoted to memory — and the memory mostly of Victorians and Edwardians, at that. I would have to think the majority of its tenants would be pleased with its Tintern Abbey-esque atmosphere of romantic, ivy-clad ruin. I was certainly charmed myself. Stone angels that probably would’ve struck me as unbearably sentimental when they were new moved me to take photo after photo with their broken limbs and eroded faces. I hate the whole idea of angels, really. But an armless angel fallen face-down in an untended grave is a scene worthy of the cover art for an album by Sepultura or Entombed (bands I happen to like, by the way). So I guess I do have my sentimental side.
Space is of course at a premium in the British Isles; except for Karl Marx and a very few other elite tenants, the dead don’t seem to get any more elbow room than riders on the Tube. The great novelist George Eliot was shoved in there like everyone else, a few yards away from a small new neighborhood of Iraqi and African communists. This chaotic comradeship of the deceased invites alternate histories, the way memories freely associating in the mind find their way into new stories and poems. And the peculiar rituals we engage in to keep memories alive were much in evidence: one grave plot was littered with fresh oranges, another with pieces of dark slate, and still another with rose petals. Note the wash bucket on the recent grave of Iraqi Kurdish poet Buland al-Haidari — no doubt as potent a reference to his life and work as the dolphin figurine on Douglas Adams’ gravestone.
Highgate’s East Cemetery is, as far as I’m concerned, the way a proper cemetery should look. My maternal grandparents, Nanna and Pop-pop, are buried in a cemetery a few miles from here, and I don’t know how typical this is of contemporary American burial grounds, but the management only allows one kind of grave marker: the kind that’s flush with the ground. No plantings or offerings of any kind are permitted; even plastic flowers and grave blankets will be removed immediately. Why? Because such clutter interferes with the central mission of keeping the grass mowed. This is a final resting-place for those who worshipped at the altar of anesthetic cleanliness — which would certainly describe Nanna. She didn’t even like having book shelves in her house, because they were hard to dust! If Nanna knew how much I enjoyed Highgate Cemetery’s rampant ivy and brambles, she would roll over in her grave.
As I drank my coffee this morning, an odd, almost repulsive idea occurred to me: wouldn’t it be awesome — or something — to interview people who hate me or my work for an episode of the Woodrat podcast? Continue reading “Flirting with toxicity”
Ty Isaf is not merely a postal address and a property of moderate grandeur and repute; it is also a work in progress, a collaboration between Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Peter Wakelin, their team of highly skilled workmen, and the various wild and domesticated beings they share the property with, including a small colony of pipistrelle bats in the attic and a noisy rookery in the treetops adjacent to the house.
Continue reading “Visiting Ty Isaf”
My favorite place in London was Kew Gardens. I visited twice and shot some 300 photos, mostly inside the three enormous glass houses. Kew hosts the oldest and largest collection of living plants in the world, representing some 30,000 species, and for a plant lover like me, it’s something damn close to paradise.
Continue reading “Among the orchids”
I was woken at 6:37 a.m. by a nearby police siren. This wouldn’t seem so remarkable if I were still staying in London, or Aberystwyth, or Brooklyn, but I was home in my own bed in Plummer’s Hollow. Why had my unconscious mind decided to awaken me in this manner? I pondered it briefly, turned over and went back to sleep.
When the plane lifted off from the Birmingham airport Monday morning and flew west over the English and Welsh countryside, I got a brief view of fields and villages dwindling below before the clouds closed in. Picturesque, bucolic? You bet. I felt a pang of sorrow to be leaving my friends — old ones and newly made alike — and wondered when or if I’d ever visit the UK again. But many hours later, as I stared through the bus window at the lush and seemingly uninhabited forests of northeastern Pennsylvania, groggy as I was from almost two days without sleep and a recently contracted head cold, my spirits soared. This was exactly the way I used to feel years ago in Japan, whenever I’d escape the city and take a train into the mountains: giddiness, as if meeting an old flame, combined with a sense of deep satisfaction. Yes, Wales was green, too, but much of that green was pasture; the mostly bare, sheep-haunted hills struck me as stark and sad.
I like cities, I really do. While killing time in Manhattan yesterday afternoon, I paid to enter the subway and just sit on the platform for a while, enjoying the ambient soundscape, eavesdropping and people-watching. Few people anywhere are as flamboyant and interesting as New Yorkers. The thunder of the trains approaching and receding in their dim burrows evoked the romance of travel as well as anything, I thought. It seemed an appropriate coda for the trip, which had begun with a visit to an old friend in Brooklyn on May 1.
When I finally dragged out of bed this morning and sat out on the porch with my coffee, though, I was gobsmacked. I’d gotten home late the previous night, so this was my first good look at the mountain, and man, did it ever change in the last two weeks! The oak leaves were just beginning to burst their buds when I left. Now the edge of the woods is once again a solid wall of green, the grass is high, and birds I haven’t heard in more than half a year were calling in the rain: yellow-billed cuckoo, red-eyed vireo, Baltimore oriole. I heard a scarlet tanager’s chit-bang call, followed a few seconds later by a cameo of the singer himself on a black walnut branch, an ache of red against the greenery. A hen turkey clucked nearby, presumably with chicks somewhere in tow. Huge success as the trip may have been, I’m glad it didn’t last any longer than it did. It’s good to be home.
For a different recollection of my trip, from one of my hosts, see “Boots” at twisted rib blog.
Like the spicebush outside my front door tonight, I am feeling a little overwhelmed by the unexpected blessings that have recently descended upon me. Superstition prevents me from publicly detailing the extent of my good fortune, but suffice it to say that none of it could’ve happened without this here blog. Thank you, blog! And thank you friends, kind strangers, and not-so-fickle-fingered fate.
With some trees, the knotholes are the last things to go. You can find them staring up from the ground, eye sockets that never belonged to a skull.
It makes sense that trees would grow their hardest wood around the weakest points in their architecture. This is called the branch collar, and it is knit with wood first from the branch overlapping onto the trunk, and then from the trunk overlapping onto the branch.
Behind the collar, in the parent trunk or limb, the branch core forms. As the Wikipedia entry on branch collars puts it,
The accretion of layers of wood behind the branch collar is a conical decay-resistant structure called the branch core. The knot found in lumber is this branch core.
When woody plants naturally shed branches because they are nonproductive, usually from lack of light, these branches die back to the branch collar. Insects and fungi decompose the dead branch, and it eventually falls off, leaving the exposed branch core. The branch core resists the spread of decay organisms into the parent branch or trunk during the time it takes for the woundwood, or callus, to seal over the wound.
There are intergrown and encased knots, loose and sound and pin knots, red knots and black knots. Whatever you call them, though, they can’t be untied. So they are not really knots, but heads — what else goes through a collar? — dense, convoluted, and all too easy to lose.
For the Festival of the Trees.
Yesterday morning’s small rain turned into fat snowflakes by mid-afternoon. I went out for a walk with camera and umbrella. Because of the soaking rain that had preceded the snow, the lichens and mosses on the tree trunks were still a vivid green, contrasting nicely with the snow. For an hour and a half, I kept shooting variations of the same photo.
The snow was exceptionally sticky, making for the most picturesque snowfall of the season. Something like six inches fell here. By this morning, even though the wind had scoured the treetops, snow still clung to all the lower branches, getting thicker the closer it got to the ground. If someone from a country without snow had seen this, they might have imagined the ground was mounting an insurrection against the sky, which was as achingly blue as it ever gets in January.
But this is March: the sun is much higher in the sky, and getting warmer as the day goes on, so it’s all turning to mush. A classic onion snow, I’d say, even if the wild onions have barely broken ground. The trees, at least, are sporting that scallion green.
Click on the photos to see larger versions on Flickr.
Some trees are agoraphobic — it’s true. With every branch and twig they strain to block out the sky, and they never leave the forest. Winter is painful for them, but they escape as best they can by drawing down their sap and hiding underground. On warm days in late winter and early spring, when their sap starts to flow again, they are groggy as sleepwalkers that have just fallen down the stairs.
Waking up isn’t always a pleasant thing, especially if you are approaching middle age and your joints creak, your skin is suddenly no longer elastic, and any weird lump or lesion could be the beginning of something dire.
Better to stay asleep and dream of sprouting a thousand parasols or hiding like a bird beneath its feathers. Better just to stand by the stream and listen to the water, which has mastered the art of running from the sky.