earthsong : birdsong

Summer Solstice fell at 4.30 this morning. As if sensing it in the air, I woke up and listened to the birds greeting the day.

As part of Writing the Climate, after last year’s gathering of words in Murmuration, I’ve chosen another bird-related analogy for this year’s version. We’ll be making a collective sound poem for the beginning of the world, a Dawn Chorus that you can add your voice to – literally. This time we’re asking for short recordings of texts that catch your sense of what it’s like to begin again, to wake up to a new day – as if you’d never seen or heard it before. What would take you by surprise? What is your dream of a better future? How might you choose to express wonder or gratitude? What is your morning song for the world?

If recording isn’t your idea of fun, then you can just send an email with your words and we’ll ask someone else to read it for you.

All the details are here. Do send something in! We’d love to hear voices from all over the world. All languages more than welcome.

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I was very happy recently to be introduced to Orpine (Sedum telephium), a wild succulent, relative of the garden ice plant or butterfly stonecrop here in the UK. Richard Mabey calls it ‘something of a recluse in shady hedge-banks and woodland edges…nowhere common.’ Known also as Midsummer Men, Livelong, or Lovelong, or Livelong-lovelong, and, in some southern places, Vazey Flower ‘because of the squeaky noise the leaves made if you rubbed them together.’

Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996)

In one of the tracts printed about 1800 at the Cheap Repository, was one entitled Tawney Rachel, or the Fortune-Teller, said to have been written by Hannah More.  Among many other superstitious practices of poor Sally Evans, one of the heroines of the piece, we learn that ‘she would never go to bed on Midsummer Eve without sticking up in her room the well-known plant called Midsummer Men, as the bending of the leaves to the right, or to the left, would never fail to tell her whether her lover was true or false…(1853)

When we were young we made Midsummer Men.  These were two pieces of orpine, known to us as ‘Live-long-love-long’.  These we pushed through two empty cotton reels and took them to bed with us.  One reel was given the name of our particular boy friend and the other was ourself.  In the morning we looked at the reels.  If the plants had fallen towards each other, all was well.  If they had fallen one in one direction and the other in the opposite direction, then our love would not be true.(1973)

The Oxford Dictionary of Plant-Lore, Roy Vickery (OUP, 1995)

Orpine (Sedum telephium)

Roundabout Garden

Sofia Botanical Garden is the only one I’ve visited (so far) that is practically located on a roundabout.  It’s hard to imagine – even when you’re actually there.  But of course the result is it’s very far from being an oasis, the constant heckle of traffic impossible to ignore.

However despite the whirlwind happening all around it, there is much to enjoy in this small but densely planted rectangle.  I’m slowly getting to know its quirks and shady corners. 

Slow is the word…even the gardeners go very slowly to be able to work in the burning heat.  Sometimes it’s cooler inside the glasshouses.  My poetry brain feels a bit like a battered coffee percolator on an old iron stove.

Solsticity

It was very good to spend a couple of days with friends up on the Northumberland coast in glorious sunshine, walking, talking, flower-spotting and bat-detecting with a clever little machine lent me by Chris Watson, who I’m collaborating with on a sound piece for Cheeseburn (it’s called Compass – come and listen over August Bank Holiday weekend). Someone told me later that bats could ‘turn their ears off’ to tune out their own vocalization, which might confuse the echolocation process. They too clever little machines.

The bloody cranesbill were an astonishingly vivid pink on the shoreline, the burnet roses and thrift just going over. Dunstanburgh Castle looked majestic, especially in the stillness of evening, and we remembered the wonder that was the Peace Camp installation in 2012.

I came home via the Tyneside Cinema to listen to Chris’s audio piece in the Gallery – a wonderful sound surround evocation of the Town Moor. My favourite moment was the thunder and the rain – it felt as if the temperature suddenly dropped a few degrees. The circus and the model train were a surprise – sweet and funny. Good to hear bats in the mix too.  Everything about the piece gave a strong impression of this ancient green space, the ‘lungs of the city’ in all its various incarnations. I could feel my Geordie heart swell with something like pride, a powerful sense of belonging – all distilled through the ears. So much happened in a totally dark space, so many pictures behind the eyes. As usual when I concentrate on listening rather than looking, I emerged feeling rinsed clean and bright – back into beautiful sunlight.

Unlike today when the sky is heavy and grey and what it and the time ahead hold anything but clear.  I am busy preparing for a month’s Residency in Sofia.  Last time I was there, eleven years ago, Bulgaria was just about to join the EU.  Now it is a member and we are about to leave…Interesting to see how that will affect us both and what folk over there think about it all.  I’ll keep my ears open – and look forward to posting glimpses here of Sofia’s Botanical Garden.