Opened
it lay before me on the path:
earth’s lightest book —
it has but two pages.
Filled with wonder I read its magic signs.
Then it ascended into the air.
No apocalypse.
Only a couple of words from summer’s
secret revelation:
Aglais io, peacock butterfly.
Christine Busta (1915–1987)
Photograph: Didier Descouens – Own work; copied from wikipedia.
Thank you to Bishop Erik Varden for sharing this poem on his Coram Fratribus blog.
By Radcliffe Hall:
A Memory
You lay so still in the sunshine,
So still in that hot sweet hour—
That the timid things of the forest land
Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand,
Mistaking it for a flower.
You scarcely breathed in your slumber,
So dreamless it was, so deep—
While the warm air stirred in my veins like wine,
The air that had blown through a jasmine vine,
But you slept—and I let you sleep.
It quite possibly was a gate-keeper butterfly that landed on the hand of the poet’s companion, a creature of the forest edge, as the name suggests. A sung version of this played on the radio this morning: ‘You lay so still in the sunshine’ by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Yesterday Mrs Turnstone and I sought the cooling breeze on the top of Wye Downs and were not disappointed. Since it was St John the Baptist’s Birthday, there was a little extra satisfaction in seeing his plant, Saint John’s Wort. You can buy expensive pills made from it that are said to enhance the mood. Perhaps a walk in a National Nature Reserve would be as effective, at least in Midsummer!
Here is an extract from a letter from the writer Charles Lamb to his friend Vincent Novello, the musician and publisher, May 9, 1826. May can occasionally feel as cold as March, as Lamb asserts, ready to put more coal on the fire.
Dear N.
You will not expect us to-morrow, I am sure, while these damn’d North Easters continue. We must wait the Zephyrs’ pleasures. By the bye, I was at Highgate on Wensday, the only one of the Party. Yours truly C. LAMB.
Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity. Kind rememb’ces to Mrs. Novello &c.
from “The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 Letters 1821-1842.
Beech trees in Maytime.
Here is the beach at Pett Level, Sussex, a few miles west of Brighton. Today we have a Londoner’s reflections on the seaside and walking around Sussex, up to 15 miles a day. Mary Lamb was in Brighton with her brother Charles and a friend. She is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth up in the Lake District. Seaside holidays 200 years ago! A little taste of her summer in our winter.
I resolved to learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable—yet when I was at Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book. I had not seen the sea for sixteen years.
Mrs. Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played truant and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of—for like as is the case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we were sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude.
I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail. You say you can walk fifteen miles with ease,—that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish.
God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.
I am ever yours most affectionately M. LAMB.
From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820, Edited by E. V. Lucas
Just like most of Europe, Kent is baking under a heat wave but as we know, mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun; starting from an early age. My two-and-a-half year old grandson was called in by his mother, who was ready for her siesta. ‘I can’t come in for a nap, the sky’s awake!’
I don’t doubt that a nap would have done good to both parent and child, but being awake and watchful can be good too!
Surely it was a day like this when the fiery chariot swung low to collect the Prophet Elijah. Elisha was certainly watching carefully. (2 Kings 2)
The wild cherries are small and bitter and ripe ones are few and far between. I photographed these on my way to forage for lime flowers. I also saw again exactly why I don’t bother with foraging for cherries: the birds get them first before the fruit gain any sweetness to human tastebuds. Why they missed this bunch I don’t know. The next picture shows the result on cherries of comprehensive pecking; the stones remain on the stalks, and the stalks on the tree.
A wood pigeon sneered at me as I stopped to survey the scene and take my pictures. Possibly one of those birds that awaken me in the early hours in summer time.
I get my cherries from the cherry lady’s stall in the High Street. She’s back after covid!
There they were, not beech nuts but nuts on the beach. The beach is on Morecambe Bay, at the foot of a low limestone cliff; the nuts were hazels. We had seen the grey squirrels picking clusters of two or three nuts, taking one to eat on the spot while letting the rest fall to the ground, where the fearless forager could harvest them. I never expected to harvest nuts on the beach!
But what are you going to do with them? asks Mrs Turnstone. Christmas is coming …
I was checking the beans at the Glebe when something else caught my eye; a newly hatched migrant hawker dragonfly, so new that the veins on its wings were not yet full of blood and traceable. The wings themselves seemed as delicate as a bubble but they would soon be taking this creature at high speed around the garden and riverbank, snapping up mosquitoes.
Welcome, Mr Dragonfly!
Yesterday, as you can see, it was raining when I got to the Garden, and it stayed that way all the time I was there. That’s not the reason for the post, though, but the plant the pictures show.
You’ll notice that it has no hint of green about it; this is because it is a parasite and cannot make its own chlorophyll. It derives this vital fluid from tapping into the roots of its host plant, which is ivy. It’s name is Orobanche hederae, or ivy broomrape.
When I was identifying this at the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland there were few records mapped in Kent, the nearest being at Eastry village 14 miles away. That of course does not mean there are none nearer than that, they may even be relatively common since ivy, the host plant, grows almost everywhere. I don’t think anyone has introduced it here on purpose, especially to the awkward corner it occupies, so the guess has to be that a highly favoured seed – they are like specks of dust – blew here from wherever the parent plant was growing. The third picture shows that there are more shoots to come, so it’s well established with us. Let’s hope we can keep it thriving.
Will Turnstone 