Schmetterling

They sit and suck the nectar from our Buddleia. The Buddleia that came with us, a rogue seedling in a pot, abandoned on the Blackpool house patio. The one that has blossomed into a massive bush and beautiful mess here in our garden in Scotland.

Red Admirals, Peacocks, Large Whites, Tortoiseshell (large or small - who knows), now in August. Earlier in the year, many Orange-Tip. At local nature reserves, Meadow Browns and the odd Speckled Wood.

Orange Tip butterfly

An occasional Painted Lady – or could it be one of Fritillaries – resting on the sunny house wall. By the time I have located my phone, or a camera, they have taken off, of course.

This past week, one of the Admirals or Peacocks, resting on Comfrey leaves, large and hairy and almost gone over as they are, directly in front of my window to the garden, at my desk. No food there, just sun, shelter from the winds, perhaps.

What do we know about these insects that are so often used as a metaphor for delicate spiritual beauty, as well as the transformation they undergo? 

Peacock butterfly

The Big Butterfly Count is in its last few days, recording sightings in the British Isles. You can link to its website here: big butterfly count It is one of the ways to learn more about these insects with two pairs of colourful scaly wings as they are described in one of the many dictionaries I consulted in research.

I wanted to know why the names in English and German – butter-fly and Schmetter-ling – are so different. To find that they are not. Schmetter – as in the Schmetter-ball of tennis and table tennis, a shot of such power that it is un-returnable, turned out to be one of those funny language things where the sense of a word is changed by the change of one letter. In this case, SchmetteR-ling (ling being a word-part that makes a word a noun) used to be, or should be, SchmetteN-ling: and Schmetten is a Southeast German dialect word for cream, or butter. You see the connection - the butter - in the English butter-fly? A German etymology dictionary takes this – in my mind a little disgusting – image of an insect that lands in butter or cream and creates a mythical metaphor of witches (Hexen in German) who fly around disguised as colourful insects, in order to steal butter and cream from dairy farms. Thieves, in other words. How we went from thieving flying Hexen to symbols of spiritual beauty? That would be another deep rabbit hole to dive into.

Tortoiseshell butterfly

Instead, please find below an early draft of a poem in a series titled ‘Ten things Blue’:

Butterfly

We found you | in our special place | the one with all the rocks | the wild 

plants that flower | some | when we come here on birthdays | sunshine days | 

days we just need to be here | the place where I remember | the 

Mediterranean | rocky coasts | from before

you flapped and you fluttered | never sat still long enough| for me to see you 

properly | never mind take a photograph

you kept me busy back at home | until I found you | Common Blue | not that 

common | not like a colourful dog | known to all and sundry | only the most 

common | of the blue ones | and every book about blue things | says how 

uncommon | blue | is in nature

I don’t know | but I see blue things everywhere | flowers | they stand still for 

me | to know them | Tufted Vetch | Meadow Cranesbill | Forget-me-not | of 

course | Milkwort | these too in our special place

And the Blaue Blume | could it be one of those | have I found it already

Postscript: any words you may not recognise in the blog or poem are easily googleable. Enjoy!

Angela

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Arbo-real

Home is where my trees are.

I can see what that sounds like: my trees? And no, I am not claiming possession. I say ‘my trees’ like people now say ‘my person’ (in a certain TV show I watch a lot). Trees are my people, my friends, my symbols of belonging.

Looking back at all the places where I have lived, I remember trees very well – and that is saying something from someone whose memory is sometimes clouded by brain-fog.

I remember the Laburnum tree outside my childhood bedroom window, Goldregen in my native German, literally translated ‘golden rain’. It stood at the corner of the house, right next to where my head would rest on my bed. I remember funny noises at night, that seemed to come out of the walls, which turned out to be birds nesting in it.

I remember the fir tree in front of the house that was planted either at my brother’s or my birth - I have photos of it being not much taller than me as a young child. I also remember my father dangerously climbing it by the time it was as tall as our two-storey house. It was Christmas time, to fix the Lichterkette (lit. light-chain) to it that, even though as a teenager, I thought it was pure kitsch, it still shone my way home in the wintry darkness, returning home late in my parents’ car – the lights were not switched off until everybody was home.

Living in cities in Germany, and then in London, there was the odd tree – like the Magnolia in Bochum Stadtpark that signified spring when its first flower opened, and some trees in Kew Gardens in London that gave me a feeling of sanctuary when I visited, but nothing close to home.

It wasn’t until I moved to Lancashire that trees came back into my life in a big way. I remember a November day in Preston when I walked to Avenham Park, for a botany project in my first year of studying herbal medicine. I found an elder tree! Sambucus nigra – a source of so much goodness, flowers, berries, even leaves, helping humans in times of need. Sadly, I found it just as a gardener yanked it out of the ground, he scowled at me when I asked why – because it was a nasty weed, he said. I was learning to know better than that, and when I began guiding walks about medicinal plants, I made sure to tell people about the Elder spirit who, if any of its body is removed without asking permission first, will bring seven years of bad luck to the thief. If only all trees had protections like that.

My favourite plants grow out of the cracks. I remember a particular Elder tree that emerged from the old red brick railway bridge across the Ribble. It grew at first horizontally out of the side of the bridge, fairly high up, then made a 90 degree turn upwards and continued vertically, in the manner most trees do. For me, it was a symbol of nature overcoming human endeavour, when left to its own devices. A symbol of hope.

It takes me back to my youth when songs like Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand (lit. under the cobbles lies the beach) were sung at demonstrations against US nuclear missiles being stationed on German soil during the Cold War era. I badly needed hope then that the world would continue to live and thrive at that time when World War III seemed a real possibility.

Arbo-real: resistance is real. Trees are real, across time. They are a gift to the future. The trees we planted in our new home in Scotland could outlive us. The Elder tree has pride of place, the sapling placed smack bang in the middle of what was a green desert of sileage grass when we moved in three years ago. It is now as tall as our woodshed/workshop at the other end of the garden.

It also shields the arbour – a bench with sides and a roof that we often sit in on warm(ish – we are in Scotland after all!) summer nights, with the bat detector hissing, trying to see the stars obscured by the glaring streetlights (don’t get me started, that’s another story).

I sit in it reading my new book that I picked up on holiday: ‘How I became a tree’ by Sumana Roy. If you like trees, and reading – if you got this far, I am assuming some interest in both – I can warmly recommend this book.

It is not just trees that we have planted: the huge Larch trees in the churchyard and the three Scots Pines on our daily walk are friends to me, the Giant Redwood in Mabie Forest, all are greeted by my hand, when I remember. And I feel I should mention a tree we brought here from our previous home in Blackpool, a Buddleia. A person connected to that tree, one of our lovely neighbours there, passed away recently (RIP Sandy). It was a sapling when we moved, self-seeded into one of the many pots around our patio, and we assumed that it was an offspring of the one we planted there. But when it did flower here in Scotland for the first time, it turned out to be from our next door neighbours’ tree – more reddish-purple than the one we had bought. Today, I saw a butterfly on one of its flowers for the first time this year, a Red Admiral. There is hope, and life, if only it is left to its own devices. Our garden, a wild mess, is luscious and beautiful and full of bees and bugs and birds, my idea of paradise.

I shall close with a poem that echoes some of what I have mentioned. It was first published in the Open Book Scotland anthology of 2022 titled ‘I give my word’, and I was honoured to read it at its launch at Wigtown Book Festival in the same year.

Belonging

How to make this place home?
I plant trees in the garden
and a hedge, for the bees and the ladybirds,
the song thrush, and blue tits, and the little mouse that lives in the wall.

I put up curtains and blinds, for privacy,
brighten the broad windowsill with flowers;
a prism hung from the curtain rail makes rainbows in the sunshine.

I chat with neighbours, sometimes for too long,
and try to understand why those old people talk about the graves in the churchyard so much.
My ancestors are far away now, buried by war, displaced by violence.

I want to build anew
embedding Haw and Blackthorn, Elder and Hazel
May their roots become mine, with time.

Angela McG

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Branching Out - The Ties That Bind Us

The other day, I found myself having a gentle fight with a buddleia. It is actually three buddleia bushes intertwined and in spite of my best efforts to keep them under control, they are branching out as they wish. The tallest has the deepest purple blooms I’ve ever seen on a buddleia, next to it is a white one which flowers later with huge, fat blooms loved by bees and butterflies. Originally planted in front of them is a pink one, supposed to be miniature but isn’t. They are all beautiful and though it pains me to remove lower branches, I have to make sure my well-established and cherished ‘Totally Tangerine’ geum has enough space and sunshine. Seemingly from nowhere, something else appeared, which is hard to believe because I’m always checking the garden and usually know off the top of my head how many buds are waiting in the wings on the nasturtiums and how many sweet pea stalks have gripped the trellis. This ‘something else’ took me back to my first school days when the walk included a lane where the hedgerow was filled with large, white flowers. It’s something I’ve always remembered, and here it was growing in my own garden, lucky me. It was like ivy on a vine and I loved the nostalgia – until I looked it up and discovered what it really was. Bindweed. It had to go, hence the careful fight with the buddleia where it had wound itself along a few branches. Not many, thankfully, and no damage done, but I believe it is hard to get rid of completely and I’ll have to keep watch. It isn’t just the bindweed keeping me busy.

 I’m also branching out on my family tree following an email from a distant relative. We’ve been in contact before but never met and don’t share a bloodline, but we are linked together by the marriage of our respective great grandparents which puts us on the same branch in our ancestry and we can help each other out with information. Stepping out of my direct bloodline has sent me on a fascinating journey – one of those that starts on Ancestry.co.uk at about nine o’clock p.m. for an hour, but carries on beyond midnight. It’s never ending.

My poem,

Branches of my family tree

Stretching out of my bloodline,

Yet belonging to what is me,

What I consider mine.

I’m gripped by who has gone before,

How they lived and why they died

And how they make me yearn for more,

Despite the many tears I’ve cried

For people I have never known.

Those who lived before my birth,

My kindred spirits having flown

Beyond the confines of this earth,

I will embrace you in Heaven.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading, keep safe, Pam x

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On A Roll - Minor Misfortune

We’ve been on a roll of minor misfortune.  I think it started with the car breaking down. Luckily for me, I was at home getting regular updates on how quickly Green Flag can attend so I delayed cooking tea and sat down with a brew to watch the news. Modern day cars are like another world under the bonnet. A sealed world.

My father taught me basic car maintenance, oil, water, tyre pressure and wind-screen washer topping up. Over time, and with a succession of multi-owned vehicles, I learnt the benefits of a liberal spraying of WD40, or similar; how to check points, clean spark plugs and how a distributor fits together – oh my first Vauxhall Viva – it will be a metal cube somewhere now. Or perhaps a washing machine.

We were dealing with the sealed under-bonnet of an automatic Citroen Berlingo. The engine won’t start when there are warning lights on. The warning light stays on until the problem is rectified. The problem can’t be detected until the person with the diagnostic box of tricks plugs in and links to some software. The I.T. skills of the modern mechanic know no bounds. Whatever would my dad think? I bet they still suck air through their teeth while calculating the cost. Just kidding, that was my dad’s sense of humour. Green Flag and both repair garages were very good. We discovered that the gear-box is not automatic, it’s semi-automatic. That snippet of knowledge didn’t help the situation, but it meant relocation to a Citroen specialist.  It’s mended now, wheels roll. £££.

The stair carpet was coming loose on a couple of treads. At last, we got the fitter in to fix it. Straight forward easy job, even easier if there was a small, spare piece. Of course, there’s loads rolled up in the shed. Well, there was until someone sorted stuff out and went to the tip. Thank goodness, a couple of decent sized pieces were within reach, for someone with long arms, without the carpet fitter and myself  having to empty our shed. Funny how I’m often on my own at times like this.

We didn’t discover what set the smoke alarms off. Nothing was burning, no cooking going on, no steam from the shower. It was raining, very heavily, though I can’t imagine it was that. Our smoke alarms are connected to the mains, one goes off, they all go off. Impossible to think straight in that noise, I just wanted it to stop, right now. My husband discovered which one of the three was the culprit and disconnected it. A replacement was needed, something he could do himself and no great expense, just another ‘thing’ going wrong and we still don’t know what triggered it. Whilst checking, I went up to the attic room. It is a loft conversion and used to be a bedroom, but is an attic again since the children moved out and left stuff for storage. There was a small puddle on one of the stair treads, about three steps up. It has become a mystery. Everything up there was bone dry, no sign of the rain breaching the Velux windows or the ceiling and there is nothing to spill. Very odd. Also, the door had been locked for days. Spooky!

What I wanted to do before we ended up on a roll with all these little incidents, was to tidy the garden, get rid of our ‘complimentary’ buddleia, thanks birds, and plant some daffodils bulbs. Maybe tomorrow?

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw an advert for a ‘Garden on a Roll’. That would do nicely.

 

Here's something from G.K.Chesterton,

 

The Rolling English Road

 

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

 

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

 

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

 

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

 

G.K.Chesterton    (1874 – 1936)

 

 

 

 

I'm hoping for no more mishaps for a while. Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

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