Quotidian

The hellebores keep on giving

I first came across the allure of the hellebore nearly 20 years ago when watching the BBC programme Gardener’s World. Inspired, I went off in search but found them scarce in mainstream garden centres, where they were rarely sold to advantage or at their best.

In those days I was naïve to specialist nurseries and mail order services. Nor had online shopping become a commonplace. But one weekend, I think in 2006, I was visiting a small plant centre near Great Ayton in North Yorkshire with my elderly mother, when I came across a beautiful hellebore plant with fresh green yet leathery leaves and a flower of five white petals flecked with a paint splash of purple surrounding a heart of creamy coloured nectaries. It was pricey and I bought it with some trepidation, wondering if it would survive long in the Dumfriesshire garden.

For a few years it lived on a sloping bank with a path running below it. The position made it possible to look up from the path and gaze into its mass of elegantly drooping blooms. The idea was good, but the path in question was one rarely taken, and so I moved it to a spot I pass at least once every day. There it has stayed and seems content, though it has bulked up very slowly and I have not had the courage to spilt and divide it to create more plants.

Frog seasons

The tell tale signs began to emerge a few weeks ago. Shifting a pile of newly delivered logs, a couple of semi-comatose puddocks required relocation to a safe damp spot. Then one wet late evening as I left the house for a dog walk, an inquisitive member of the family Ranidae, hopped straight towards me in the porch before making an abrupt right turn and then dissolving quickly behind a green Wellington boot. Next day the builder rescued a couple of Rana Temporaria from a watering can.

The accumulating evidence was clear. Frog season was upon us.

Heading Home: a miscellany of writings

In late 2020, on saying goodbye to four decades of work in academia, I resolved to devote time to something that had been bubbling up in my thinking for quite a while: the desire to continue writing, but to do so in a more creative and inventive manner. True, I’d recently written a biography which allowed some scope for imaginative interpretation, and in my academic blogging I was finding the confidence tentatively to break out of social science conventions. But now I wanted to bring about a more visible shift, from the data-driven and rational orientation of the scholar, to an approach to writing organised around personal reflection, imagination and careful observation of things around me.

Epiphanies and Robberies Chapter 2: Candlemas

Andrew, Michael and Anne-Marie meet up by chance after attending an event in the village Hub. They go on to share an impromptu meal in Kirkgate’s Lowther Arms and start to learn about each other’s circumstances, passions and struggles. The meal is a success and at the end of the evening, Andrew tells them about two art robberies that took place in the region in 2003 and 2013. He wonders if a pattern might be emerging, here in Nithsdale. Could 2023 see history repeating itself?

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: In this story I mix up and blur chronologies, geographies and biographies. Any resemblance to a person living or dead is purely coincidental. The 12 chapters of the novel Epiphanies and Robberies appeared sequentially throughout 2023. They have now been re-drafted and are in search of a publisher.

The novel also has a playlist to enjoy, you can find it here: http://open.spotify.com/playlist/0XSzB1w8hfrRPUBzs4KFNF?si=JkkDbGmRQM2WeHjcOrFOLg

Dogwood delights

A nurseryman once told me, with casual dismissiveness, that dogwoods belong only in carparks and on roundabouts. Like most gardeners I too have my botanical aversions, but I do object to this wanton demonisation of the dogwood.

I say this with particular force just now, as the Winter is coming to its end. For without doubt during these past months in the arboretum field adjacent to the main Dumfriesshire garden, it is dogwoods that have been the star performers, whatever the weather conditions.

Stacking wood

Robert Frost’s evocative poem, The Wood-Pile, mourns a beautiful ‘cord’ of maple: cut, carefully stacked in the forest, and then mysteriously abandoned. It is leaning precariously, sinking, long past its best and ‘far from a useful fireplace’.

Discovered by the poet, on a wintry walk, Frost considers the apparent quitclaim of such an impressive wood-pile. Surely, this must be the action of someone who flits from one thing to another, abandoning and forgetting past achievements – to leave so carelessly such a useful stockpile?

To the contrary, my own thinking settles on a more likely interpretation. Surely the person is dead. For what woodcutter would relinquish such a carefully assembled horde, other than through death?

Snowdrops at Candlemas

For such diminutive plants, it was a Herculean feat. After something like a month of frost, with the ground as hard as bell metal, and then with fresh snow falling, our old friend galanthus nivalis made it through in the nick of time. I find snowdrops always take me by surprise. After days of watchful waiting, you turn your back, and there they are.

We are blessed with many snowdrops around where I live.

Epiphanies and Robberies Chapter 1: Rising Water

On 6th January 2023, in the aftermath of local flooding, three troubled people in the Scottish village of Kirkgate contemplate the year ahead. Obsessive academic, Michael Gilmour has been thrown out by his partner, who is unwilling to live any longer with his constant work obsessions. Newly retired GP, Dr Andrew Carlyle Stuart, has just got through his first Christmas holiday since the death of his wife. Anne-Marie Maxwell, a talented young musician needs to make a breakthrough this year, otherwise she’ll take up school teaching. Their three separate lives are about to connect.

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The novel also has a playlist to enjoy, you can find it here: http://open.spotify.com/playlist/0XSzB1w8hfrRPUBzs4KFNF?si=JkkDbGmRQM2WeHjcOrFOLg

Floods in the garden

As the Christmas guests departed and the old year stumbled into its last few days, I was looking forward to a period of quiet contemplation, one or two pleasant walks, and a chance to check out upcoming tasks in the garden.

It wasn’t to be.

Just as the cheerful farewells were being said and the house was restored to some sort of order, two things struck. More or less simultaneously.

After a day or two of feeling unwell, Dr G and I tested positive for COVID-19. We’d had a good run. This was our first time, despite significant exposure to the virus. Over the next week we experienced a shifting array of unpleasant (sometimes puzzling) symptoms, brief remissions, and headache filled days

This wasn’t to be our only challenge however.

The missing person: a Christmas mystery

I’m home for Christmas, with a whole week to go before the celebrations begin. My end of term marking is complete and the research paper I’m writing can easily be progressed here in Dumfriesshire, away from the distractions of London and the university world.

I tell myself all this, but my deeper reasoning says otherwise. This early arrival for the holidays is really about avoiding a repeat of last year.

I’ve written before on that particular episode. I’d reached home late on Christmas Eve to find an empty house. Within a few minutes the dinner table somehow became a meeting place for three long-dead Nobel Laureates, who proceeded to unveil a plan for global peace and harmony. A plan which was then summarily thwarted in disastrous circumstances. I still haven’t been able to take it all in and I am hoping beyond hope, that elements of those inexplicable events from a year ago won’t resurface this festive season.