The Magic of Nature: A Sadness of Elms

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elm, illustration, Nature, nature writing, plants

The elm is a sad tree in many ways, both because of devastating disease and some depressing folklore. It’s an unhappy plant.

My first memories of it are unfailingly cheerful, however: it was the very first tree I learned to name. We had them on our doorstep, you see, four elms planted in a row at the end of the garden. I loved them, especially in winter, when the bare twigs formed a beautiful lattice-work. They reminded me of stained-glass windows framing the sky beyond. In spring I awaited the bursting of the leaf-buds, eyeing them hopefully on my way to school each day. When we studied Browning’s poem Home Thoughts from Abroad, I immediately understood his joy at seeing the first unfurling elm leaves. Of course, I did – I looked for them, too.

Later I made friends with a large spreading elm precariously perched on the river bank (it and me both). We even moored our boat to one of its chunky arms for a while. Its leaves turned a wonderful shade of autumnal yellow, so the river swam gold with them – a last gasp of colour before winter set in. I loved it. In my teenage years there were pollard elms planted across the road from our house, so I could look into their topmost branches from upstairs windows. They felt like friends, too. So, you see, from an early age I was familiar with the rough surface and elegant asymmetrical shape of elm leaves.

Elms blossom in winter. The flowers are tiny and a startling wine-red if you can get close enough. And then follows a false foliage – the winged fruits are pale green and leaf-like. I loved them too, the first fruits of the year in February.

Needless to say, all those elms I knew are long gone, victims of the dreaded elm disease. Our old garden was built over, and the space our elms occupied is now under somebody’s driveway. The great elm by the river was felled and left a gap in the landscape that has never been filled. The elms-across-the-road are nothing but a memory. I have no way, now, of knowing what species these long-lost elms were, but I suspect by their general shapes, that the garden trees were English elm and the great tree by the river was a wych elm.

And these days? Well, I could take you to the remains of an old (possibly ancient) English elm hedge not far from my home. I still get to see the lattice of twigs, the wine-red flowers and the pale fruits. I still get to touch the rough leaves. But the trees are small; they die off and regrow from the base over and over. A sort of elm ground-hog day. There is always a lot of dead wood. But in my memory live magnificent elms, full of verve and life. Breath-taking beings in the landscape. I count myself fortunate to have known them.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

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The Magic of Nature: Puffins and Cabbage

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flowers, illustration, Lundy island, Nature, nature writing, puffins

It isn’t often that two of my nature wishes come true in a single day, but as I stepped aboard the MS Oldenburg one perfect June day, I hoped they might. Puffins and cabbages – not on the same plate, you understand – but on the same island. We were heading for Lundy out in the Bristol Channel. The omens were good as dolphins led us across the sea. Now most people know about puffins, the seabirds with the engaging clownlike appearance, but who has heard of the Lundy cabbage? Well, I had.

As a teenager I would while away winter evenings poring over my wild flower book, memorising the pictures and entranced by names. The Lundy cabbage caught my eye. I had heard of Lundy – mainly as a sea area on the shipping forecast – but I was hazy as to its exact location. Lundy was somewhere Out There, storm-lashed, remote and dangerous, and some of this exoticism rubbed off on the plant that bore its name. What sort of island had its own cabbage? What sort of cabbage had its own island? My imagination worked overtime; surely this must be some sort of pirate cabbage. As so often, it was nearly half a century before I had the chance to see for myself.

As I stepped ashore on Lundy Island that day, I was prepared for a long hunt for my cabbage, or even not to find it at all. In fact, it rampaged all along the cliff path and took no finding at all. Now, I should come clean and admit that, as plants go, this one is nothing special to look at, and most people would dismiss it as an odd weed and walk straight past. But not me. I cupped its yellow flowers and held a bit of magic in my hands. The mysterious Lundy cabbage was in my very grasp. I took lots of photos.

Lundy Island itself is a delight, especially on such a fine, warm day, and later I stood on a verdant cliff-top and saw my first ever puffins. Other visitors lingered at the sea-bird colony, too, enjoying this natural spectacular – but I doubt if many of them felt, as I did, that the puffins had been upstaged by a cabbage patch. Such is the magic of a life spent observing nature.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature: an Understatement of Elders

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Artwork, eldertree, illustration, Nature, nature writing, Trees

Elders are often so small and scrubby, they hardly seem worth the name tree at all. They may grow to about 20 feet (6 metres), but so often they don’t. Definitely an understated tree.

The first elder I remember meeting was a scrubby little thing with its roots and trunk entangled in a ruined wall. I got to know it well one winter when my parents had taken the family boat, a little cabin cruiser, out of the water for a refit. The boat was parked opposite the elder, so my gaze ran over the tree every time we visited. The trunk was gnarled, and bore patches of pale-green lichen – quite a welcome splash of colour at that dull season. In January, I noticed more pale green than had been there before, so I took a closer look. Not more lichen, though – the tree was unfolding leaf-buds. In February that year it snowed. Frost sat on the riverside meadows, and icicles hung from the boat’s side, but the elder tree seemed unperturbed, kept its part-unfolded leaves in suspended animation, and picked up where it had left off when the weather improved to become the first tree in full leaf. You can’t help but respect a plant that does that.

Later that little elder put out flowerheads, too. They are saucer-sized, so you wouldn’t expect much understatement in that, but they are a modest cream colour, large but soft-toned. The fruits are purple-black, a little more showy, I suppose, and my chief memory of them is gathering bucketsful beside an old gravel-pit by the Thames to make elderberry wine. Heady stuff, it was, and not understated at all.

These days, the elder I visit most often is another scrubby little plant. It stands in a ditch half-way across the causeway between the Isle of Portland and the mainland. This Dorset elder has a lot of weather to contend with, exposed to salt gales from both east and west. A salty summer gale can blacken its leaves so they drop in despair. But new buds soon swing into action – this is a very tough little tree. I would say it’s about as tall as I am; any attempt to put its head above the parapet of the ditch gets dried, snapped and blown away. Some years it even manages to flower, though I’ve never seen any fruit on it. It keeps trying, I suppose, the occasional flowers a triumph of hope over experience. One day, perhaps, it will bear fruit and I shall congratulate it on an achievement against all the odds. Nature, I guess, can give us a lesson or two about not giving up too easily.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature: A Remembrance of Shelducks

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illustration, Nature, shelduck, writing

Shelduck among sea aster

My earliest memory of shelducks is easily nailed down – I mistook them for avocets. Youthful wishful thinking, of course. They were standing on the far-out tideline of a bay near my home in Kent, looking very black-and-white and I jumped to conclusions, silly girl. And however they might look from a distance, they are not actually black and white. There is a deep glossy greenness to the head and neck, and a band of orangy-tan across the chest. Add in the bright scarlet bill and pink legs and feet and this is quite a multi-coloured bird if you can get close enough.

After this beginner’s error, I came to know shelducks quite well. When we went upriver by boat, their heads would pop up from the marshy fields to see what was going on. They were such a regular sight, we named one of our boats after them. No, she wasn’t the Shelduck, she was Tadorna, from the species’ Latin name. On a trip down to the river estuary one day, a family of shelducks appeared and Tadorna was surrounded by her namesakes. That was a surreal moment. We cut the engine and watched the troop of pied ducklings skittering through the waves after their parents.

These days I see shelducks along the Dorset coast. They don’t seem to stray very far from the sea, feeding in the shallows of a saltmarsh, their heads go up, just as I remember them, checking you out. Sensibly wary, I’d say.

But for all that, last winter a shelduck took up residence among the gulls on the sheltered side of Chesil Beach – right opposite the window of the wildlife centre, so I and everyone else could sit in the café admiring the bird from close quarters while drinking our coffee. My kind of bird-watching, these days. Just another duck, really, but what the heck – I gazed at it and whispered Tadorna, remembering the birds and the namesake boat of half a century ago.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature: a Haunting of Herb Paris

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Artwork, flowers, illustration, Nature, wild flowers, writing

Herb paris from my illustrated magical tale The Herbarium

 When I was first learning my plants as a teenager, I had an advantage: there were no identification apps, no smartphones to download them onto, indeed no computers at all so far as ordinary people were concerned. If you wanted to find out what plant you were looking at, you used a handbook. I say this was an advantage because there was no instant identification – you had to slog your way through the book, compare the pictures, learn the botanical terms and generally put in a bit of work to find the name of your plant. It was slow, but you learned an awful lot along the way. Another benefit was that you looked at all the other pictures in the process and began to realise how many other wonderful, colourful and interesting wild plants were out there waiting to be found. Many a dark winter’s evening I spent poring over my book, anticipating what plants I might see in the coming year.

One of those I dreamed of finding was herb paris. Was it the intriguing name? Yes. Was it the strange appearance? Yes, again. Four flat leaves with an odd knotted bunch in the middle.  It could have been beamed down from a passing starship.

I longed to see one for myself, but I had a very long wait – the better part of fifty years. Deferred gratification taken to extremes, you might say. As I walked through a Dorset woodland one early summer day, my eye was caught by a patch of yellow among the trees. The plants were past their best, the leaves turning, but I recognised them at once. They were unmistakably herb paris, and every bit as weird and alien-looking as I had imagined. It was an extraordinary moment of wish fulfilment. I had finally seen my mysterious herb paris after so long!

Now tell me, could someone walking along using an app to identify the plants they see ever experience the sheer joy I felt at that moment? ‘Oh,’ they might say, ‘it’s called herb paris. Strange looking, isn’t it?’ and walked on. But for me the plant, until that moment just a picture in a book, had become an almost supernatural being – the possibility of ever finding one had haunted the back of my mind whenever I walked in unfamiliar woods. Yes, it was all in my head – of course – but that is the magic of nature at work over a lifetime, isn’t it? It’s not very scientific, but I don’t think I’d want to see either nature, or the herb paris plant, in any other way.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature – A Delight of Violets

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books, flowers, illustration, Nature, nature writing, plants, violets, wildlife

Dog Violet from my magical tale The Herbarium

I don’t know if delight is the proper collective noun for violets – I just made it up – but it’ll do nicely. Violets are delightful. They were one of the flowers that made many a 19^th century poet go all lyrical, and endow them with the human characteristics of modesty, determination in the face of snowy weather, even loneliness. That romantic and deeply human-centric view of nature is deeply unfashionable now, but it was very much the way I learned to love the natural world from my mother and grandmother; beauty and language played a strong part. I’ll stick my neck out and say it’s as good a way as any for a child to develop a love of, and respect for, nature. Scientific understanding can come later.

But back to the violets. They were one of the first plants I learned to identify. In the garden of the big old Victorian house where I spent most of my childhood, sweet violets would reliably appear under one of the scrawny hawthorns. My sister and I would pick a little bunch for our mother’s birthday every March. This had nothing to do with science and everything to do with sentiment – but we still learned at an early age where the violets grew and when they flowered. As I said, there are worse ways to develop a regard for nature.

Later, I learned there were other types of violet – unscented dog violets that spread more purple delights along woodland paths and edges, and the hairy violets that grew among the grass tussocks on the open Surrey downland, as well as violets of wet places and heathland that I never did manage to find. But the sweet violets always spoke loudest to me. There was, and perhaps still is, a tradition of planting them beside gateways. A field gate on the downs was a reliable place to find, year in, year out. White-flowered, those were. And here in Dorset, I could take you, come next spring, to a field gate only a couple of miles from here where a traditionalist has planted violets. They were well-established twenty years ago when I first found them, but they could have been there two hundred years, for all I know. It’s the sense of continuity that appeals, and the toughness of those fragile little plants weathering the weather, hooves and tractor wheels, down the ages.

I’m perfectly aware, of course, that the flower’s beauty of form, colour and scent is aimed at pollinating insects and not at me. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy and admire them, just like the 19^th century poets. So, unfashionable or not, I shall continue to delight in violets.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

A story is never really finished…

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book series, books, Isle of Larus

It’s always difficult returning to old haunts. It’s particularly difficult, as I discovered last year, when the old haunt is a figment of your own imagination.

The last novel in my Larus series was published back in 2016, so it had been quite a while since I’d thought about those characters and that setting. In between times, I had written another novel and a series of illustrated books; the Larus novels were out of print and I thought I’d left it all far behind.

But the creative imagination is a wilful creature, and as we came out of the last lockdown (in the UK), I found there was a story determinedly forming, a prequel to my old Larus tales. It was strange to reimagine my grumpy old parson, the Reverend Pontius, as a callow young man just setting out in life; but reimagine him I did, and the story, as they say, wrote itself. It took a great deal of effort to remember the original tale, and, indeed, I went back and rewrote some of it as I went along. Even so, I soon had a neat little novella, and an idea for another. And another.

My lovely publishers, Veneficia Publications, have now issued Call of the Merry Isle, as I titled it, in paperback, and I am hopeful that the other stories and the original novels too, will all be published in due course. Merry Isle is a delightful story, though I say so myself, with the serious young Reverend Pontius encountering some unlikely people and even more unlikely events as he seeks his way in life.

It just goes to show that a story is never really finished. I had thought the series complete with the third book, but here it is bursting out again. It feels good to have the Isle of Larus and its quirky inhabitants back in my care once again. I have more ideas for them than I can cope with, but that, as they say, is another story!

Call of the Merry Isle is available from Independent Publisher | Veneficia Publications| United Kingdom

Taking your time: art can’t always be rushed!

Tags

art project, Artwork, books, plants

Sometimes it takes a long time for an idea to germinate. One of mine took a whole year. Back in July 2020, I was standing under a particularly fine beech tree with my daughter when she suggested I ‘do a book based on trees’. At the time, my two illustrated magical books The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary were being prepared for publication, and I was completing a third book in the series, so I mulled over the idea until I had time to write a few experimental stories for the tree book. I decided on an autumnal setting, and a general idea for the overall story began to take shape. But then I thought about the illustrations and how to approach them. Trees are complex and there are many different parts of them you can illustrate, from leaves, to twigs, to fruits, to bark; I simply couldn’t see a way to go about it, and eventually I set the project aside.

That was nearly a year ago, and, of course, much has happened in the interim, including two lockdowns here in the UK. I set myself fresh projects and planned two novellas (the first is with my publisher, the second nearing completion). My tree book remained on the back burner until a few days ago. I was doing a crossword, and the answer to one of the clues was ‘yew’. Trees, I thought, and remembered my abandoned book. I inked in the word YEW, downwards in the middle of the puzzle and suddenly had an idea. Put the tree name in the middle of the illustration, I thought, and work round it – make it part of the design. In my other books I had added the plant names at the bottom or top, or sometimes at the side of the drawings. But I would be able to arrange elements of each tree much more easily if I integrated the lettering into the drawing instead of around it. Bingo! Soon I had working sketches. There’s much more to do, of course, but essentially I can see the way forward and the project is alive again. I can resume work writing and illustrating my long-delayed tree book with confidence. So you see, some ideas can’t be rushed. They pop into our heads when they’re ready. After that, it’s up to us to take advantage of them!

Quirky Tales series My illustrated books The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary are available from www.veneficiapublications.com. The third book in the series, Dropwort Hall, will be available soon.

Good Prospects

Tags

Artwork, Book launches, books, the future

Despite all the disruptions and difficulties of the past year, it’s been a good one for me as a writer. My two illustrated books were published last autumn, and I am looking forward to a third being issued later this year. In between times, I have produced a little book of short stories, a lot of artwork and written a short novella. Not bad, really, for someone who tended to lose her creativity during lockdowns. The books and art are now with my publisher, and they also intend, in time, to re-issue my entire Isle of Larus series, too. I couldn’t be happier at this prospect.

Still, I have a lot of editing and updating to plough through, another novella in hand, and much artwork to attend to. There are (fingers crossed) forthcoming book fairs to prepare for and, hopefully, a long-delayed book-signing. Good prospects again.

But there is much to do, so I am going to take a break from this blog, the first in several years, through this summer. This will give me a chance to catch up on my reading, visit family, and perhaps just spend some time sitting and staring at the sea. That’s a delightful prospect, too.

 I will be back with regular blog posts from late summer onwards. I wish you a peaceful, happy and healthy season, and, of course, good prospects.

My illustrated books The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

Leaving your mark: your writing is your legacy

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future, posterity, writing

‘It’s about what you leave behind, isn’t it?’ said my publisher when I met her for coffee last week.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. There are lots of reasons to write: everything from making money to simple enjoyment. But having something to leave to posterity is another matter. It isn’t something you think about much as a young person, but as the years go by and it dawns on you that you’re not actually immortal, it becomes more important.

Your writing can take your voice forward to future generations. It isn’t entirely immortal, of course, but it’s a lot less mortal than we are ourselves. It’s a way of leaving your mark, and your own particular thoughts, behind you.

When I was writing a novel set in the eighteenth century, I read the work of contemporary authors to gain an understanding of the times. It was fascinating to hear those long-ago voices; and it was the juxtaposition of the completely familiar, where their lives overlapped recognisably with ours, and the utterly alien, where they didn’t, that taught me so much. The past really is a different country, as they say. So, when our present day becomes the past, our writing will help the future to understand us. This is just as true, I think, for the fiction writer as for the diarist. Or the blogger. Life as we comprehend it is in the stories we tell, the words we choose, the things we take for granted, and in our sense of the ‘normal’. I can’t choose to be here myself to tell these stories – or not indefinitely, anyway – but my writing can. It’s the closest thing I have to immortality.

So, I shall continue writing as long as I’m able, leaving my mark (or quite a lot of marks, actually), as a small legacy from me to the future. It’s comforting to know that my thoughts and ideas will still be there when I’m not. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get on with it. The clock is ticking and I still have quite a lot more to say…

My illustrated books The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary are available from http://www.veneficiapublications.com