PRINTS AND PATTERNS

This is a bit of side-step from usual Loose and Leafy posts. It is about patterns, rather than plants and it includes two garden plants as well as wild ones.

The pictures are very cropped so there's no point in clicking on them. They aren't especially interesting botanically but . . . look at their colours.

Here lie inspirations for curtains and clothes. Bit of a come-down, I admit. Flowery curtains have long been laughed at. Flowery clothes can look all wrong. Not necessarily though. I'm not a designer - but I'd love to be clothed in the woods and hedgerows and snatches from garden plants.

That's all - four prints in a block.

There - don't they make you happy?

THEY DO NOT LABOUR, NEITHER DO THEY SPIN

I was born between eras and the generations of my family are widely spread. (A chain of middle-aged mothers.) It shows in my language. There are Victorian undertones.

Not that I've picked up the habit of speaking in the repetitive imagery my parents used.  Indeed, I've shrunk from it.  But in the last few years I've got beyond smirking over their hackneyed turns of phrase, learned to set irritation aside and realise how rich with history their stock-in-hand similies were.  My mother would come into an untidy room and complain it looked as if a bomb had hit it  -  and announce a blitz to put it right.  'Rich' did I say?  Maybe I should have said 'burdened'.

My father's comparisons sprang from an even earlier time  -  when women shone with pre-raphaelite beauty, there were no cars, agricultural life impinged still on the cities and everyone had servants.  (Well, everyone who wasn't one!)  How my father expected me to be beautiful, I don't know  -  for it's not easy to be graceful when one's wardrobe consists of crimplene cast-offs and gleanings from Church jumble sales.  But he did.  My father also thought anyone who paid attention, in how ever small a way,  to personal appearance  -  was vain.  Ear-rings  . . .  ear-rings!  Only the morally depraved wore earings!  (Those and actors playing pirates.)  Mirrors  . . .  danger there!  They were useful to men when shaving but only the vain looked in them otherwise.  All in all, it was quite difficult to live up to his dreams.  Impossible, really.  Women were supposed to be effortlessly beautiful and if it didn't work quite like that, well  . . .   they ought to be.  Beauty was supposed to come automatically, along with gender.  If it didn't he was perplexed.   (Oh how he was perplexed!)  And  women have long hair.  Don't they?  Well, they are are supposed to.  It is their 'crowning glory'.

Here he comes  . . .  "You look like a sack of potatoes with a string tied round the middle', "You look like Mad Margaret," (who?) "You look as if you have been dragged through a hedge backwards", "Be careful  -  or you'll frighten the horses,".

(It's alright, folks.  I think I've turned out ok!)

And there were other things which simply had to be said whenever particular circumstances arose  . . .  "Nice weather for ducks," (rain) "Up tails all," (upon seeing ducks)  "It's an ill wind," (when anything went wrong) "Brave souls," (and this is where I've been heading). "I think of those brave souls who would venture out on a night like this," (when closing the curtains on a cold and stormy winter's evening).

I was going to call this post "Those Brave Souls" but, with it being so close to Remembrance Sunday, I thought it might be taken to mean soldiers who had died in battle  . . .  when all I'm thinking of is flowers.

I don't much like flowers.  Chicory is an exception.  I is the sprigged muslin of late summer and autumn rather than the chintz of spring blossoms and heavy density of June roses.

I'm pleased most flowers are over with for another year, and wanting to avoid bright berries  . . .  I went out to take photos of dead things  . . . . . .  to celebrate them.

We make a lot of fuss about spring and I suspect those of us who can toddle up to the Co-op to buy chocolates and daffodils in bud get more joy from it than ever did our ancestors.  For them, I think it must have been a time of desperate hope; their festivals tinged with fear.  For anyone short of seed, it must have been terrifying.  Everything eaten, nothing to sow.  Autumn is the agricultural, horitcultural, and everything cultural destination  . . .  and the bushes where the blackberries have been picked are a sign that harvest has happened.  The husks where seeds have fallen are a sigh of relief because the seeds were there to fall.  But my post about these will have to happen another day now because I was way-laid by these 'Brave Souls' still flowering  . . .  despite the onset of wind and rain  . . .

. . . beginning with the over-hopeful ones  -  like this blackberry, which has no chance that its flowers will come to fruition but there is is happily flowering in November.  I admire its stength, its ambition, its determination to grow on to the bitter end.  I think I'll take it as the symbol of the ancient mothers in my family who had their children in their forties and didn't care if they frightened the horses.

There seems to be an almost unlimited supply of dandelion-style flowers.  You're lucky this isn't a post full of ones like these  -  only with different shapes for their leaves.  I could even be drawing your attention to the variety of petal endings.  When I come home with my camera, I enlarge the photos on the computer screen and gaze into them and wonder  . . .  I mean, why are they so varied and so complicated and yet so regular.  Daft!

Ivy  -  where the noise of buzzy insects (dull brown bees and flies) will attract attention even if one were to miss the mass of flowers.  Growing up in London for a large part of my early childhood, it never struck me that ivy might have flowers.  To me it was a thin strand of fibre with an occasional, heart shape leaf limply attached, which just about managed to creep around in the dust and soot.  Sometimes, though, it formed such a huge, dense mess of dark, drab leaves, it became a sort of overwhelming blob.  A bit menacing really.  To associate Holly with Ivy at Christmas seemed an act of poetic desperation.  Couldn't they have thought of something better?  It was like making a link between brown paint and true gold.  (Come to think of it  . . .  real gold leaf was used to put the numbers on painted wooden gates.  There used to be an extraordinary juxtaposition between the rare and the mundane, the extravagant and the ordinary.)

And it's not just dandelion type plants which bamboozle me  -  there are those too which I suppose to be in the groundsel family.  I've not yet managed to take an interesting photo of groundsel itself.  I think that says more about groundsel than my photography though.  These plants in the picture are growing about eighteen inches high.

I'm forever muddling mustard with rape as well.  Indeed, I'm tempted by the idea of categorising flowers as one might do cars  . . .  yellow ones, purple ones  . . .  (This, for my father, since he began all this, would be heresy.  He didn't actually say Latin names were divinely inspired but there was that sort of air to it.  The stamps in my stamp album were categorised under the names of countries and, if I had enough of them, by date.  I would have preferred to arrange them in pretty patterns but this would have caused mountains to erupt and great fissures to appear in the trembling earth  . . .  so they had to be in rows.  His were ordered not only in countries and by date but in all sorts of other subsections which I didn't quite follow and which resulted in lots of almost empty pages where the appropriate stamps would go if only he had them.  The spaces for the as-yet-uncollected ones were as crucial for the understanding of the whole as were the ones which were already stuck in.  (On stamp hinges which went brittle and flakey and dried out and fell off.) )

Cranesbill, would you say?  (Along with the nettle and dandelion.)  (Oh, and the grass  -  don't forget the grass!)

A low growing pink flower.  Do not be deceived by the buddleia.  The pink flower is on the top of a bank and the buddleia is growing up from lower down.  Tops of trees and daisies are level partners here.

And I'll finish with gorse.

I don't have to finish.  These aren't all the November plants which are flowering.  But gorse is a good place to stop  -  because it doesn't!  Is there a month when gorse doesn't flower?  Gorse and blackberries  . . .  food and fuel and exceptionally pretty flowers (I reckon)  . . .  Hurray for autumn!

P.S.  All the photos in this post were taken on 29th October and 2nd November.

SEEING THINGS LIKE A MAD ORGANIST

I’m going to paint my house. Only the inside walls but it takes me ages to complete anything so I’m taking a break from ‘Loose and Leafy’ while I do it.

It’s not my time of year either. Not really. I’m not a very mid-spring kind of person.

And in the breaks from cleaning and painting I’ll be experimenting with my new camera.

So far, I’m not doing well. Indeed, if it weren’t for Gary (at Gary’s Garden) who went to the trouble of downloading the manual onto his own computer and giving me some really helpful advice - I would probably have shrivelled up in despair. BIG THANKS! I’m even beginning to hope I might eventually be able to take photos where the colour comes right first time and the focus is focused on what I am photographing instead of on something completely different. By June, with luck and effort, I will have got beyond having to decide whether a nettle swaying gently in the wind most closely resembles a golfer or a plate of food. (This camera provides me with some very odd options!)

My idea of a good photograph is one where it goes straight from the camera onto the screen or onto a piece of paper with no editing whatsoever . . . No colour changes, no cropping - nothing. And it’s been a frustrating (but illuminating) experience - trying to make things come ‘right’ on the computer. Sometimes, I can. Mostly, I can’t. And when I can’t, I find myself pressing buttons wildly and randomly like a demented organist in a supernatural storm.

. . . And the results have, at times, been illuminating.

I’ve realised there can be moments when seeing something all ‘wrong’ highlights things which have been there all the time but which weren’t so prominent until their colour changed. Truly, it’s a matter of seeing things ‘in a new light’.

Perhaps living next door to Esther Montgomery is rubbing off a bit. After all, photographs from space are sometimes presented with ‘wrong’ colours when that’s the only way their information can be expressed.

So, as a final fling before I reappear with proper photographs (hopefully!) sometime in June (after the carpets have been cleaned and when the hedgerows are beginning to tire interestingly instead of being all sparkling-fresh and boring) . . . here, in this post, are some mad-organist results.

Best Wishes

Lucy

I WENT TO FROME ON SATURDAY

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Last year's Buddleia flowers

and this year's leaves.

I went to Frome on Saturday; along a little branch line which chumbles slowly between bushes and fields and is single track in places. There are even 'Request Stops' where the train will only come to a halt if you tell the guard in advance that you want to get off.

Rather grandly, the notice board on the platform said it would be going to Cardiff and the signs in the carriages were in Welsh as well as in English.

Dead leaves at the foot of a Holm Oak Trunk. You can go to Bristol on the same train too. Sometimes there's an announcement to say it will go to Gloucester instead.

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Dead Gorse.

New Gorse.

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One of the trees I am following. The slashed off branch

is still visible but catkins have arrived and the leaves are there. (Can anyone identify it yet?)

But whatever its destination - it never fails to be an adventure, going on this train. There's always a sense of 'something beyond' - a notion that, one day, one might simply stay in one's seat and leave it to chance where, and when, one might arrive. And, wherever it's going, it goes slow enough to make it worth while looking out of the window because everything stays there long enough to be looked at.

Much of the Ground Elder is taller than me now.

There are an awful lot of blasted oaks in the middles of fields on the way to Frome. You'd have thought they'd be in the way. And un-blasted ones too. There are little rivers and small hills - and a high ridge to look up to. And nearly all the fields are bright green squares bordered with the white blossom of blackthorn.

The Dandelions are like gold coins, dense along the verges. (Except gold coins don't tend to be lying around densely like this. Not round here. Wish they did!)

Not for much longer though. The further we went into Somerset, the tattier it got, browner, closer to the moment when petals will fall. It'll happen here too soon - and then we'll be into May. There's a white Hawthorn tree near my house which breaks into blossom first every year.

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And it's done it again!

Hawthorn in bud. (May.)

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And Hawthorn Blossom.

And, after the May . . . maybe last year will be gone. In the meantime, there's a lot of 2008 still around.

(Which is what, on the side, this post has been about.)

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DEAD THINGS AND DAPPLED THINGS

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Thank God for dead things

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Dappled things,

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Brown things.

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Holed things

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Old things

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Twisted things

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And shadows.

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Many more than these things!

(Not alone for green things.)

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With thanks to Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote:-

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches wings; Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

SEEING THE WORLD IN COLOUR (AND THE BLACKTHORN IS FLOWERING)

I've seen a car I want. It's rust coloured (matte) and like an oversized VW Beetle only wider, and taller - which is just as well because the hair of the young man driving it had been cut as a flat topped mohican. It looked as if he'd stepped straight out of 'The Incredibles' and he wouldn't have fitted in the car if the roof hadn't been so high.

I don't approve of cars (with a few exceptions) and I don't drive. They fill up the roads and towns have become little more than collections of car parks with shops and dwellings scattered loosely between them. They're not much good for the atmosphere either. But if I had a car, that would be the one.

* * * * *

I saw this car when I was walking into town to buy a replacement for the camera phone I dropped down the loo. It was going the other way.

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So far, I've spent nine hours walking in and out of town, trying to buy a new phone. One and a half hours of that was when I was returning a phone I didn't like and left the charger at home - which meant I had to go back to fetch it and the journey was wasted. (It's three-quarters of an hour in each direction.)) Another hour and a half was spent going to buy a different one and finding I'd left my purse behind so I had to go home for that too.

Reasons for Returning the Phones

(Remember, I don't want to phone on a phone but to take pictures with it.)

One - was five times as expensive as that I've been using. It was on a contract, which made me nervous, so I'm glad I didn't like it after all but everyone seemed to recommend it - on the internet, in the shops - so I plunged in.

How come I'm the only one not to like it?

Well, to me, it made the world look murky.

This has challenged me about the way I see things. Perhaps the world really is murkier than I've imagined. Almost all the photos I took on the old phone came out with what were, to me, true colours. There are few exceptions. One is some bark which looks yellower than in real life - but the patterns are crisp and interesting so I used it on Pictures Just Pictures all the same. And the walls of the tunnel in the Roots and Water post aren't as brightly orange as they appear. But at least you can see them, so I used them. But almost everything else has come out just right - leaves and trees and skies and toadstools and all.

This is where the car comes in. There are some things, things as well as people, that one simply bonds with - as I bonded with my phone. It's light. It fits in my hand. It and I see the world in the same way - so we are friends.

* * * * *

Presumably, the people in the shop and the people on the internet who recommended this other (expensive) phone must see the world differently from me. They must see the world as shown by its pictures.

The young men who sold it were very kind and patient. I could tell they were trying to see things from my point of view, understand my interests. They explained how the camera on the phone searches for faces and focuses on them. It will even wait until the people in the picture smile. (I didn't ask for how long.) (Nor what it would do if some people smiled and others didn't.) So, I told them about my blogs, and how I take pictures of plants. So they talked about how to take photos in the snow, or on the beach, about front lighting and back lighting . . . for instance, they said, if you were taking a photo of a plant in a night club and the strobe lighting was on . . . they even showed me which buttons I would need to press.

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Since taking it back, I've been trying to see the world as that camera sees it - all dull and murky and bland. And I can. It takes a bit of effort and it's taken me a while to do it - but, now, I can.

It's like listening to a huge orchestra and picking out one instrument, intentionally being more aware of the 'colour' of that sound than usual. I'm not meaning exaggerate its influence or listen to its tune or rhythm at the expense of others, just being more aware that it is there.

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The other phone was more straight forward. It didn't focus properly.

However, before I took that one back, I had a go at the black and white setting. Strangely, the focus was sharpened - but its idea of black and white turned out to be not in the least like mine - I saved some of the photos I took on it and am using them to liven up this post.

Talk about seeing the world differently!

P.S. It had a 'grey' setting too. The photos on that setting came out . . . grey.

P.P.S. I've found a phone like my old one, on ebay, new . . . fingers crossed . . .

If it's an identical twin of my old one (which can't be guaranteed, every single object has its own character, there's no such thing as a clone . . . )

Well . . . perhaps in a fortnight . . . I'll be up and running as usual.

And happy.

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P.P.P.S. The Blackthorn is flowering.

PHOTOS IN THIS POST

Header - Rambling Rector Rose and Spanish Broom.

Then:-

1. Tea Towels on Washing Line.

2. Antarctica Fern.

3. Rambling Rector Rose (again).

4. Shoes and Broom (of the sweeping kind).

5. Cordyline Palms

6. Trunk of Madeleine d'Angevine Vine and Japanese Anemone

7. Wild Blackthorn and Gorse

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For the Next Post - Two Letters, Two Trees and Some Weeds

For the Post Before This - I've Dropped My Phone Down the Loo

I'VE DROPPED MY PHONE DOWN THE LOO

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Yesterday evening, I dropped my phone down the loo.

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I didn't mean to. I'm heartbroken. I fished it out and dried it off and rubbed it all over with lens cleaner which, I think, being a spirit (I think) will have killed off any germs which adhered to it during its short dive. I've been carrying it around all day, pressing the buttons in a vain hope that it may be restored to life. I'm not dead yet. But it still is.

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I've been to town to see about buying a new one. Samsung doesn't make them any more. The newer version is thicker and heavier and pink. I can't take photos on a pink phone! Quite apart from the indignity of it, it's shiny and 'd glare in the sun. The pictures would all be skee-wiff and I'd have a permanent migraine. To buy it in black, I'd have to pay twenty pounds extra!

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Twenty pounds for the colour black!

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I came home.

I went to bed.

I felt sick.

I had a headache.

All I wanted to do was sleep.

I slept.

I've woken up.

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Tomorrow, I'll be going back to town and paying twenty pounds for black.

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Today's blog was going to be about primroses in an old churchyard. Wordsworth's brother is buried there. (He was shipwrecked nearby.) And there's a pirate tombstone. And celandines. And daffodils.

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But you know where the pictures for that post went? . . . Which is why, today, there isn't a proper bog - I mean . . .

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For the post before this - Roots and Water

SEVEN DOGS AND AN AWFUL LOT OF TEENAGERS

Esther, my next door neighbour has been away - and I was out when a man with long hair and seven dogs knocked on her door.

Apparently, he banged her door and rang her bell for half an hour. He even went round and banged on her front window, trampling across her bulbs on the way.

What I don't think Esther has mentioned is that after she scarpered off to Mars I found several pots of globe artichokes in her back garden. Spares. She must have been planning a globe artichoke farm, there were so many of them. (Talk about obsessed!) Anyway, I planted two out, one at the front and one beside the holly beside her front door. The one at the front remained small - but flowered. The one by the holly grew taller - but didn't flower. I kept a third in a pot on my windowsill (I still have it). I let the rest die. (I was having enough trouble with her tomatoes without having to worry about her potted artichokes as well.)

If I had seen the man, I might have called out to warn him about the artichoke and the bulbs. No I wouldn't. I'd have looked out and worried. And if Esther had been there - well, she'd have opened the door, so it wouldn't have happened. (Ming thinks it may have been a man about a boat. He has some funny friends.)

As it was she wasn't there and nor was I, so, after a half an hour of him trampling and banging a couple of teenagers who were hanging out on a nearby corner went over and said they thought Esther (I mean Mary) was out. Which she was.

After that, he went away. Maybe he was disconcerted by being spoken to by teenagers. Maybe he thought they were being insolent in pointing out the obvious. (Well, it should have been obvious by then.) Anyway, he went.

This has got me thinking about teenagers.

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A few years ago, in the winter, around nine or ten o'clock at night, when it was dark, about fifty of them ran up our road, milling about and shouting. They seemed to be chasing three young men who, finding themselves cornered, turned and managed to run back through the crowd and escape.

For a while, all was noise and chaos. Neighbours (like me) came to their windows and looked out anxiously. Esther went out and spoke to them. She asked one of the girls what was happening. The girl said they were playing Number Knock. Number Knock? A grown man was hurrying by on the pavement as fast as he could. Esther asked him if he knew what Number Knock was and whether it mattered. He said he did. And it did. And went.

But it wasn't clear why it mattered. Did it matter to him because he didn't like the rush and the noise. Or did he think it mattered to the three young men who had run back through the crowd? After a bit of caffluffle, it went quiet - and they were gone. All of them.

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The next day, Esther phoned the local Secondary School to ask about Number Knock. The lady who answered the phone didn't know and didn't see why she should. Esther said that since nearly all the teenagers in the area were in the school's care for most days throughout most of the year, the school might be presumed to be an authority on teenage activity. Ha!. So we were left with not knowing whether we should leave it be, or intervene, or phone the police if Number Knock came down our street again. It hasn't. But what if?

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Then, a couple of years later, there was another mystifying teenage event. About the same number of teenagers, forty or fifty of them gathered in our park. They arrived gradually, in groups, until there they all were, sitting on the tables, sitting on the little roundabout, sitting on the very little slide, sitting on the little rocking chicken thing - and telling the little children who were playing there that they should leave the park or have their heads bashed in.

Some mums went to remonstrate.

Some mums phoned the police.

Two policemen arrived in a car.

They ambled towards the teenagers.

The teenagers ambled away in groups, just as they had arrived.

And that was it.

They'd done no harm. They'd just sat. I don't think they would have bashed the heads of the little children. On the other hand, the meagre toys in the park are for little children to play on, not for the big teenagers to sit on. So it was right that they should give way.

So . . . there they were. Then . . . there they weren't.

I'm rambling on about this because I have the care of Ceres and it weighs on me.

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I've always reckoned that if you are confident and polite you can negotiate your way through most crowds, drunk or not, and find a way round almost all awkward individuals.

People with mental health problems who decide to harangue you at bus stops can be frightening and embarrassing - and you are stuck if you need the bus, which you do, or you wouldn't be at the bus stop - so you are an un-moving target. But the bus will come in the end (with luck) and whisk you away. So that's alright.

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But, over the last few years, I've noticed people with empty eyes. Un-meetable eyes. Eyes I dare not look into. There is no relating there. No negotiating.

There aren't many of them - but seen them, I have.

They walk straight ahead, full of fierce purpose, looking neither to the right nor to the left - just on, straight on. Fast.

I fear them.

They walk alone.

I think they walk in otherwise benign crowds - like missed grit in rice.

It's Ceres I have to advise. And I don't know what to say.

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P.S. He didn't stand on the artichoke. Phew!

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For the next post - A Welcome and a Warning to Witches

For the Post Before this - Mr Houghton