Cicero in the Garden

                   Cicero awaits spring

 

In the garden I hear it is noontime. No need to check the clock. The children in the national school two miles away up the hill are playing in the yard during break. Their shouts and screams blow down the valley. A sound older than a hundred years.

The cat pauses in the quiet hum of the springtime landscape. Ditches murmur with water. A newborn calve moans for its mother. A lonesome donkey somewhere up on the edges of the forestry brays. The wood pigeons coo from finally-budding sycamore trees.

Will the sparrow hawks that moved in last summer return?  Will the cuckoo be early?

“And when,” I turn to Cicero “will the swallows come back?”

Today the first day of April, the cat and I await spring, eagerly yet patiently.

A page from Iris’s Notebook where she writes and sketches about the flowers in her garden in the west of Ireland.

A Rose by any Other Name

Lately I have been thinking of names. Names of flowers and plants. Those that fit and those that somehow don’t. A Clematis is a Clematis, it has the climbing delicacy in the sound, a Berberis Vulgaris is definitely Berberis-sounding, prickly and barbary. Although vulgar is going a bit too far. But there are others that seem like orphans with names that don’t quite belong. For example, Scabious. Does that conjure a pretty blue-flowered plant with small heads?  Or Rudbeckia fulgida? Nothing rude about the wild Black-eyed Susan, much loved by children, seen growing in un-mown fields of the US.

I know the strangeness of an odd name, because I sometimes have the same thing with my own. Sometimes  I feel like it doesn’t belong to me or I to it, because there are days when I’m pretty sure I am not anyone’s idea of an Iris.

I was thinking of this in the garden in Ashwood today. A last rose had survived the wind from the west and was standing in perfect bloom at the end of a long stem. The name of the rose escaped me. I tried for all I was worth to remember.

‘What is your name?’ I asked.  ‘Celestial? Juno? Cupid? Dame Prudence?’ Pink roses all.

But nothing would bring it for me.  (Note to self: write these things down!)

In the end I decided it didn’t matter. What’s in a name? A rose is rose.

Her name is Rose.

Sea Change

 

Onward Hail and Ole

Rainy summer is in full swing here, but nothing can dampen the turning of the world.  It goes on with or without you – the seasons and the garden and the very music of life itself. You’d think the rain might have a slowing-down effect. Even hope it will. But nothing can deter the steady passage of summer into autumn. The cuckoo has flown south. The baby swallows have left the roof beams. The purple moor grass is turning orange. 

Neither wind nor rain nor sun nor grey skies can hold back the changing seasons. So perhaps they change in us too. The thing your slow red-headed gardener realised in her garden today was not to resist. Because what the garden teaches the gardener is trust. Accept the change. And not only that, but cry out: Onward, hail and ole, and celebrate it.

Beyond the Gap

Sometimes it seemed like madness, especially now. Beyond her garden the land was boggy and rush-laden – rushes tall as hazel rods – and full of clay. But inside the fuchsia hedges that bordered the garden, the sticky soil had been transformed into one that was like loam. Adding seaweed gathered off the rocks at Doughmore. Adding leaf mould from the sycamore trees. Adding compost and manure until the blue gley soil became rich and yielded the rare lady slipper orchid. Sloping southwards to seek the thin and capricious sun that shone in the west of Ireland were…

Rain Again

Rain A Gain?

 

 

 

Midsummer’s Day.

But in the garden wet with rain…
Iris can’t garden.

Maybe tomorrow…

Come On Somebody

Last Day of April
by CBWilliams

Getting used to this being alone required a skill beyond her, she thought. It was on the far side of road, as if the sunny side was always over there—the place she couldn’t get to. Although she’d travelled some distance from the initial grief-pain of  death to where she was now—
standing still in her garden listening to the barn swallows Chideep Chideep—
there was a wide gulf between here and there.
She turned the key and went inside.

Inspired by Hockney

Purple Parrot Tulip by CBWilliams

April is the favoured month around the cottage Iris lives in, not only because Spring is in the air, but colour too is emerging as the grey veil of winter is drawn aside.

A purple, parrot tulip stands in an ancient Irish medicine bottle found intact in a stone wall around Iris’s cottage.  It poses on the lid of an old black Aga.

Everything in Iris’s life needs colour – whether it be the blue bottle she keeps for flowers in the kitchen, or the glazed tiles from Provence above the stove.

Pierre Bonnard wrote: “Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.”  Iris feels this about her life.

This drawing, inspired by David Hockney‘s iPad drawings, celebrates the triad of Spring and colour and life.

Note: Drawing App used is ‘Inspire Pro’.

Light Breaks

Come in to the Garden

Quickly now comes the garden.

Every Spring the light surprises.
The way it is suddenly here,
and every door and window seems an invitation
into its light.

The day is awake before you.
The birdsong full of urgency.
The air articulate with elaborate intricacies of notes that are both ancient and new.

How quickly it has happened.
You find yourself in the fast green filling of April.
And you feel: you’ve never quite noticed the light like you do right now.

Stand still.
You might just see the buds bloom.

Soon, like arrows of sunlight, in the open doorway of the stone cabin, past the purple shutters, the starlings will soon swoop.

Marching into April

Silage Bales by CBWilliams

Marching into April
Toora ta loo rye aye.

Beneath the out of season hot blue sky
silage bales sweat, yet sweetly, in their plastic wraps.
Golden gorse scents the air with coconut.
And sheltered in the ivied stone wall
viola odorata and oxalis bloom.

Blackthorn spins its white lace-like blossoms.

While woodbine, downy-leafed twins with everything.

Toora ta loo rye aye

April comes…