Lacy

Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus Carota)

also called Wild Carrot, Bird's Nest and Bishop's Lace

Splendor in the Grass

 Allheal or Heal-all

(Prunella vulgaris)

Poetry Thursday - How to Make a Tomato Salad

The tomato
warm from the garden bed,
juicy and full of seeds, a woman ripe for love.

The onion
make it sweet and lingering—
adulterous kisses, darkness at noon.

Dashes of salt, a taste of the source,
the seas coming in at the window.

A full blessing of oil—
the fruity olives pressed
by monks chanting a cappella
the earthenware jugs stored in cool cellars,
mellowing.

The basil leaves, spicy and fragrant—
a lover's fingers.

You cannot make too much of this.
And when it's gone...

its memory will, in barren winter,
be like the small hot flame
of a love letter read in secret.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

(from Doors to the Universe)

reprinted here with kind permission from the author

Dolores captures the enticements of a summer salad made with garden tomatoes, fresh herbs and olive oil wonderfully, and this is one of my favorite aestival poems.  She is a gifted poet and a fine author, and you may visit her here.  I was delighted to learn recently that she is about to publish a new "Divine Circle of Ladies" novel and a new volume of poetry.

Wordless Wednesday - Lit From Within

Morning Glory

(Ipomoea purpurea)

Hazy Morning

Ambrosial

Abraham Darby (David Austin)

July 2011 

When I stepped out onto the deck this morning, what greeted my freckled nose was the heady perfume of roses in full bloom - all kissed by early sunlight and dishing out frothy sublime fragrance with abandon. 

A thousand and one bumbles are tipsy on the perfume and staggering around the garden on uncertain wings, dusted with pollen and buzzing blissfully.  Bewitched by the sumptuous sweetness on offer, they are unable to settle on any bloom for very long, and their ecstatic dancing from bloom to bloom makes one think of summer poems by Hafiz. 

Ambrosial is the word for a summer morning like this one, the only word that will do.

Water Runs Down

Friday Ramble - Sweet Abundance

You rise early (five-ish) and trot out to the garden wearing your favorite cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, carrying a mug of Earl Grey.  It's already wickedly hot out there, and the waning moon dancing overhead is somewhat obscured by a high gossamer heat haze.  Another scorcher is on the way, and the only sentient beings here who are happy about it are the mindfully foraging bees and the vegetables in our garden: beans, peppers, tomatoes, squashes, chards and various gourds.  The zucchini (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over the garden, if not the whole wide world.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance....... That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming down the years to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include:ample, generous, lavish, plentiful; copious; plenteous; exuberant; overflowing; rich; teeming; profuse; prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the perfect word for these circumstances of fullness, ripeness and plenty, as we weed and reap and gather in, freezing things, chucking things into jars, "putting things by" and storing the bounty of summer for consumption somewhere up the road. Like bees and squirrels, we scurry about, hoarding the contents of our gardens to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long. 

Our cups are truly overflowing, but for all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering, there is a subtle ache to these long aestival days with their heat hazes and ripening vegetables.  As much as we long for cooler times, summer is all too fleeting...

Wordless Wednesday - Mermaid In the Green

Thursday Poem - A Kite Is a Victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives like a desperate
trained falcon in the high sweet air
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you've written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.
 

Leonard Cohen

(from The Spice-box of Earth)

Wordless Wednesday - Falling Water

Early Morning Rain

Goddess in Summer Flight

Milkweed (Ascelepias syrica) is in full flower in the Lanark Highlands, and the heat drenched fields on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are full of butterflies. We've seen feeding Monarchs at a distance, but alas, there are no photos to post here this morning.  Spencer goes dancing through the fields ahead of me, and he scatters butterflies like confetti as he frolics through the tall grasses. His ears fly; he kicks up his heels, and the white curl on the end of his expressive tail oscillates back and forth like a flag - his enthusiasm for life and freedom and sunny summer days is delightful to see.

A female Aphrodite Fritillary (Speyeria aphrodite) was resting on the path down the hill yesterday, and when she fluttered languidly into the tall white clover nearby, I did manage to capture a photo of her. When I arrived home, some long time with a magnifying glass and various texts was spent trying to decide whether she was (in fact) an Aphrodite Fritillary or a Great Spangled Fritillary, another of my favorite summer butterflies.

The small black spot below the discal cell on my beautiful basking friend was so small, faded and indistinct as to be almost indiscernible, but it was there, and there was no wide pale band on the hind wing when she was seen in profile - the spaces between the markings on the underside of her wings were a bright coppery color.

The beautiful circular silvery markings on the undersides of the Aphrodite's wings are an "all natural" organic phenomenon known in the science of chromatics as structural coloring (or in layman's terms as iridescence). Light reaching the wing spots is scattered or reflected by multiple layers of specialized scales, rather than being simply absorbed by the more ordinary wing pigments between the spots. Structural coloring abounds in the Old Wild Mother's creations, and we see it in all sorts of wild places - various butterflies, beetles and other insects, blue jay and peacock feathers, the shells of oysters (where it is called mother-of-pearl or nacre) and cephalopods like the glorious Nautilus with its perfect spiral shell. Mama does such things better than we ever could, although we are always trying to go her one better.

A Monarch capture would have been nice, but yesterday's Aphrodite was in her glory and her element.  She was magnificent, utterly magnificent.

Summer's Golden Currency

Alight

Yellow Coneflower

Thursday Poem - Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas

 
I read this poem every year around this time, and whenever I do, I am carried 

back to golden childhood summers spent on my grandmother's farm.

Word(less) Wednesday - Pot

 

Who is the Potter, pray, and Who the Pot?

Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát

Vibrant Days

Ah sweet and shaggy July... Waist high stands of purple Viper's bugloss (Echium vulgareare) in the Lanark Highlands are buzzing with intoxicated bumblebees. Brown-Eyed Susans are blooming, and almost every flower wears a sparkling Red-blue Checkered Beetle (Trichodes nutalli) like a enameled brooch.

We haunt our fields looking for Monarch butterflies and their offspring, hoping to find gloriously striped children arrayed like royalty and clinging to the underside of milkweed leaves. It is cicada time again too, and we listen for male annual cicadas perched high in the trees and calling to attract mates - I'm always on the lookout for newly emerged cicadas in our poplar groves.  So far, there has been only a single Monarch butterfly in the air over the Two Hundred Acre Wood, and there is no sign whatsoever of caterpillars and emerging cicadas, but these are early days. We will continue to potter about and look for butterflies and cicadas at every opportunity.

In the western field, last year's milkweed pods are draping themselves across their younger kin with insouciance or leaning against the old rail fence like weary travelers.  I never tire of looking at their thousand and one textures and the muted variegation of their earthy hues. Who knew that gray and brown came in so many delightful shades?

Yesterday, two female wild turkeys crossed the lane in front of us in late afternoon.  They were shepherding their unruly offspring before them like like little brown sheep, administering a gentle peck here and a nudge there to keep the inquisitive children moving.  The two families were speeding along at a fine rate, and their appearance was so unexpected that I didn't have a chance to snap a photo.

Floating

Spatterdock or Yellow Pond Lily 

(Nuphar lutea)

Wordless at Twilight

A favorite view around twilight...  The scent of water and reeds hovers in the air, granite and evergreens and weathered planks.  There's the sound of the river gamboling down through the gorge, under the bridge and out into the lake, waves lapping the shore and the old dock creaking on its splintery pilings, crickets and bullfrogs, the plangent voices of drifting loons, an occasional rasping of herons.  There are coyotes singing somewhere nearby, and they sound happy.

The setting sun is a sphere of flames over the distant shore, and at the end of  a summer day, its light paints a sparkling trail clear across the lake.  The backdrop is a frieze of purple clouds and floating islands, slow ripples spreading outward from the center, birds going home to roost for the night.

Crone sits on the dock with her feet dangling in the water, and she knows a deep and peaceful stillness that comes along all too rarely.  She senses Great Mystery all around her in the twilight, grace and a wild elemental truth that she wishes she could share, but she can't find the right words - this evening she can't seem to find any words at all,  That doesn't bother her though.  She will let the images speak (or rather sing) for their own wild selves, and oh, how they do sing. Who needs words on such a night?

Green, Gold, White...

Oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare)

Metallic Sweat Bee (Augochloropsis metallica)

Friday Ramble - Aestival

The word aestival comes to us from  the French word of the same spelling and the Late Latin aestīvālis, both originating  in the earlier Latin form aestās meaning summer or summery.  The verb form  aestivate means to spend the summer in a specific place (at the cottage perhaps) or engaged in a specific activity.

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of living creatures to be somewhat drowsy and slow moving in the heat of a summer day.  Botanists use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud. Once upon a time, I thought that the word siesta (referring to a nap after lunch) was related, but discovered a while ago that siesta comes from the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of daylight.  The words sound similar, but  they are not kindred spirits as far as I know.  Nor is the word festival related, although it too sounds as if it should be kin.

Aestival is one of my favorite words for the bright and flowering weeks in the middle of the calendar year.  Summer is a good word, but it can't hold a candle or even a match to the frothy magnificence of the golden season which reigns so briefly here in the north.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance conjures up images of festivals and celebrations, gardens in madcap blooming, trees full of singing birds, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion and perfect sunsets across the lake shared with herons,  At the end of day perhaps, there are fizzy potions with little paper umbrellas in them, vegetable skewers on the grill and homemade sherbet made with the first strawberries of the season.

Looking out this morning, I can see the tall spires of day lilies through my study window.  It is still early here, and all the blooms are folded up like rolled umbrellas, but in an hour they will be open and the undistilled essence of summer.  It's all golden, and it's all good.

Happy July everyone, and if you live in Canada as I do, Happy Canada Day.