flowers – Page 28 – don't confuse the narrator

pruning, ploughing and punning

For the last week, the skies have been almost solid grey and the drizzle has only been interrupted by intermittend torrential rain and the occasional thunder storm. This has all come while the plum trees have been in full bloom, so I imagine we may not get much fruit this year as there have been few insects around to pollinate.
Continue reading

dewi sant

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daffs outside my window for the last month and wondering if they’d make it out in time.

In the end, despite showing colour for a week now, they haven’t. Perhaps later on today, if the sun keeps shining, they will unfurl their yellow flounces in celebration of St David’s day.

Mind you, they aren’t real daffs, anyway, as they are multi-petalled, double flowers, not the clear bright-trumpeted kind that line the road down to South Wales.

(For information about the wild daffodils of Britain, check out the I Hate Daffodils! website.)
Continue reading “dewi sant”

hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
Continue reading “hazy thoughts”

penny for them

After a fairly miserable weekend weather-wise, Monday dawned bright and sunny and positively spring-like. So I took the opportunity to gather some violets for my desk.

(In the photo they are on the book shelf simply because it’s tidier than the desk.)
Continue reading “penny for them”

anthological exercise

I’m pretty sure I’ve read that Wordsworth wrote his poems while out walking, and that the rhythm of his strides helped him work out the metre. (Pause here for a link to Lynn Peters’ Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother.)

I try and walk every day, even if it’s only down to the post office to check the mail box. I walk in the hope that I’ll get ideas to write about; I walk to iron out the pieces I am working on; and I walk for exercise. Yesterday was the first reasonable day for a while when I was free to take time for a longer walk, so I went round the reservoir.