Five Questions for... John Rooney

By Sara Bellini

One of our favourite Berlin bookshops has recently reopened its doors - with a new look, in a new location - and we couldn’t be more thrilled. After the non renewal of their rental contract back in August, Curious Fox. had been absent from the Berlin map until this February, when it moved to Lausitzer Platz in Kreuzberg. While walking down the stairs that lead you to the bookshop, you step under a beautiful black and white mural depicting the new neighbourhood, the nearby overground train, and of course a fox.

The hand behind the artwork is that of Derry-born illustrator John Rooney. “The owners Orla & Dave are good friends of mine and asked me to work on a larger mural on the exterior of the new shop. Unfortunately I had just decided to leave Berlin at the time and thought a smaller mural inside would be more feasible. Myself and Orla are keen bird enthusiasts so I included a kestrel and a jay (which live in the trees opposite the shop). I drew some buildings from the neighbourhood too. It was a very fun way to spend my last week in Berlin.” 

You might have seen some of his works in Standart magazine or on windows and walls across Berlin - and Ireland. Drawing inspiration from pop culture (cult movies, sci-fi and literature), nature (he has a dog collage series) and architecture (check out his cityscapes), each composition strikes us for its dynamicity and layers of details, perfectly balanced between accuracy and artistry. If you are curious about the aesthetic potential of the garden spider, the common pipistrelle bat or the Portuguese man o’ war, have a look at his wildlife map of Ireland. No snakes obviously. 

In his hand-drawn bird collages and wildlife maps, John Rooney presents a place through its fauna, giving equal importance to the tiny creatures and the majestic ones. The latest addition to its portfolio is the wildlife map of Canada, with over 480 species checked by experts at the Biodôme in Montréal. 

According to his bio, “John has not stopped drawing things ever since he was the age of three”, and we are glad to hear he has no plan to stop any time soon. We caught up with him just before he left Berlin, where he had been based for the past four years, to embark on adventures around the world.

What does home mean to you?

A place where you feel at peace and have people around you that you care about. Cliched, I know, but it's that simple for me.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I'm not sure if you'll accept a place that doesn't exist anymore but I'd have to say a pub called the 'Bound for Boston' in Derry where I spent most of my late teens / early twenties. It was always full of sound people and had great bands playing every week. I have a lot of great memories there. I do love Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin too. 

What is beyond your front door?

Not much right now to be honest. I'm living in the suburbs of Derry and the nearest pub is 15 minutes away and it's dodgy as fuck. Although there's some football pitches behind my house that have a lot of nice trees with bullfinches and siskins flying around the place.

What place would you most like to visit?

I'd love to just stand at the foot of Mount Everest just to see it and take it in.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I'm currently reading a comedy book called Mickey Doc by a Derry author called Fintan Harvey. I'm watching the Kanye documentary and also Lovecraft Country. I'm listening to some Junior Brother and a lot of Kylie, who I rediscovered after watching an episode of 'Reeling in the Years' on RTE.

John Rooney's Website
John Rooney on Instagram

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

The Cuckoo's Place

By Rebecca Welshman:

I follow an overgrown track alongside the dark recesses of a Sitka spruce plantation. Although sunshine rarely penetrates these shadow-wrought trunks, a feathered visitor has taken up a perch among the topmost boughs to sing. The sound carries through the air, stands out above everything else. I heard my first cuckoo in Henfield, Sussex where I spent my childhood. The scrubby streams and unkempt meadows surrounding the village at that time were the cuckoo’s ideal habitat. In East Sussex the arrival of the cuckoo has long been associated with a specific place. At the annual cuckoo fair in Heathfield each April a cuckoo was released from a wicker basket to mark the start of spring – a tradition with origins at least as far back as 1315 when the fair was given a charter. In the mid nineteenth century an elderly woman was still known to visit the vicinity at dawn to “turn out the cuckoo”. Today the fair is still held, and pigeons are released from a basket instead by “Dame Heffle”. As a herald of spring, the cuckoo symbolises the return of the light; the life-renewing emergence from the dark dormancy of winter. 

But for many years the cuckoo fell silent in my life. Over a period of ten years, as I moved to Liverpool, to Somerset, then Cumbria, I heard only one. The last place I heard it was in Shropshire, three years ago: a faint distant call, holding memories of fields and woods. Now, in Dumfries and Galloway the cuckoo’s song is once again part of spring. The very real reason for this of course is that cuckoo populations have declined in England, and increased in Scotland. The valley where the male cuckoo has taken up residence lies at the edge of the Ae Forest, a sheep-grazed island within an area of industrial forestry that stretches for miles in all directions. Its gently sloping sides are planted with sitka spruce, with some recently clear felled areas. Its floor is a broad soft tussocky expanse bisected by Garpol Water, a shallow fast flowing burn that has its origins in the Lowther Hills. Many thousands of years ago this would have been a river basin. Domed heads of islands still pepper the landscape, and amongst them are scattered the last remaining native tree species of the valley – birch, rowan, and oak. Although the ordnance survey map draws a clear yellow line along this part of the hillside, the forest has no real boundary on the ground. Miniature spruce grow wherever they happen to put down their resilient roots, in walls, on mounds, or amongst the gritty broken tarmac of forest roads. At the forest edge-lands any sense of ownership dissolves. 

A maverick of the bird world, the word “cuckoo” is synonymous with “strange”, and “eccentric”, suggesting its lack of conformity, a lone existence. While the bird is celebrated as an emblem of British springtime, it has also been maligned as a trickster and thief. Their true breeding habits were strongly disputed until the 1920s when ornithologist Edgar Chance made the film “The Home-Wrecker”, which showed the cuckoo laying her eggs in other birds’ nests. One of only two avian brood parasite species, fledgling cuckoos manoeuvre the eggs of their host bird parents out of the nest to make room for themselves. While these behaviours may seem treacherous or cruel, it is not our place to judge them by human standards.  Cuckoos feel the pull of spring time in the British Isles as much, or deeper, than we do. Their actions are hard-wired into them, set deep in their psyche after centuries of repetition. The instinct that drives them to return here each April to breed is detectable in their haunting two-tone call, which carries a beguiling air of mystery, compels me to listen, taps into my own instinct to pause whatever I am doing. 

This remote Dumfriesshire valley, now the cuckoo’s summer home before it returns to Africa, was once a contested area. A twelfth century castle mound still guards the rough track leading into it, and the rectangular outline of a much earlier earthwork is just visible amongst the green bog grasses beside the burn.  An ancient way visible on nineteenth century maps once threaded the valley from west to east and connected the distant hills with the infrastructure surrounding the Romans and Reivers route a few miles to the south. Deep within the valley can be found the remains of a circular monument with an entrance stone still standing. Remnants of cairns lie scattered around. A single aged oak tree growing from an islanded knoll watches over. Its branching trunks, dead at the ends, are angular and defiant, like antlers against the skyline. 

Scrub and heath – types of terrain that do not lend themselves to cultivation – are some of the cuckoo’s favourite places. As such the bird has long been associated with borderlands and heaths that once lay at the edges of medieval land units. The historic place name Yekheth in Acton parish, near Nantwich, derives from the Old English “gaecc” meaning “cuckoo”. It is a high point in the landscape, as is the neighbouring Wrenbury Heath a few miles to the south. In Irish folklore the cuckoo is attached to landscapes with historic human presence. The field of the mythical battle Moytura, in which the forces of light fought against the forces of darkness, has the highest concentration of megalithic monuments in Europe. A high point once known as “Cuckoo Hill” is marked by Eochaidh’s cairn. According to the writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, in his play Moytura, this spot was once known as “the cuckoo’s starting place”. That this bird of summer haunts the cold stones of an ancient tomb again reaffirms its association with the tensions between light and dark. The cuckoo, which embodies the light and dispels the shadows, has penetrated the human psyche at a deep level. It is no wonder that people all over the country still stop to remark upon hearing its first call.

Here at the edge of the Ae Forest the cuckoo’s mellow wood-note rings with piercing clarity. I draw closer, thinking that at any moment my footfalls and presence will disturb him, but still he calls. At the top of the hill I turn right onto the Southern Upland Way which leads away from the forest into the valley. As I leave him behind his echoing calls gradually grow more distant, and even though I know I cannot see him, I still turn back to look. This wizard of the woods has me under his spell. 

***

Rebecca is an author and researcher who lives in Dumfries and Galloway with her family, and numerous animals. Her publications include edited collections of the works of Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, and essays about literature, language, and the natural world. Her writing can be found at: rebeccawelshman.wordpress.com/blog and https://liverpool.academia.edu/RebeccaWelshman

Canal

By Rachel Sloan:

2000

The first time I find the canal, it’s an accident.

It’s January, I’m twenty, I’ve been in London only a few weeks. I’ve never been abroad before and everything dazzles me. But I spent last night in a crush of bodies in some West End club and this morning I’m desperate for quiet and space, so Regent’s Park it is.

Restless, I stride past the places I already know well and head north – in search of what, I don’t exactly know. I know Primrose Hill lies beyond, but before I reach it, I glimpse a snaking line of trees. Patches of water flash between the gaps. There’s a path and I follow it down and then everything changes.

The canal unspools in both directions. To my right, a long green ribbon of water and the peaks of Lord Snowdon’s aviary. To my left, a string of weeping willows, bare branches bowed toward the water like a group of mourning fair-haired giants; an enormous double-decker scarlet barge that looks like leftover opera scenery; a low bridge through which the canal bends away sharply and disappears. I turn left.

I pass gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, arbours laced in barky coils of wisteria, warehouses with windowpanes punched out like black eyes, thickets of trees and brambles wedged against brick walls. The silence is near total, the clangour of traffic sinking away into leaf mould and water. Crumpled lager cans and eviscerated crisp packets drift together in makeshift islands but when I stare down into the water I catch flashes of silver and gold tipped with red: roach, maybe bream. I round another bend and catch a heron picking its way through fallen twigs, its neck unreal, its eyes locking for an instant with mine.

I grew up thinking that the world was parcelled into boxes marked City, Suburb, Nature. As I walk I feel those tidy divisions blowing apart. In their wake is something rich and strange. Something that just yesterday I would have laughed off as an oxymoron. 

Urban nature.

I don’t yet have the vocabulary to get to grips with this new kind of nature, just a bone-deep feeling of belonging, despite this being a place I’ve only known for weeks, unlike the place I was born and where I lived for eighteen years. What I find at the canal isn’t the Romantic landscapes of Keats and Wordsworth that I spend my days dissecting in cramped seminar rooms.

One day, browsing a bookshop table piled with contemporary poetry, I stumble upon Tobias Hill. The Regent’s Canal runs through his poems like a mud-flecked golden thread. Here is someone who understands this place that exists within London and yet is not fully of it, that ticks along on its own parallel time, someone who can feel and give form to what the canal does to sound and light. He writes of air ‘pressed / into white slabs of mist’, of a dying eel entangled in a sunken shopping trolley, of canal-side magnolia blossoms glowing like lightbulbs and blackbirds whose pollen-filled mouths ‘burn with it / like fuse wires’.

When I leave London at the end of my semester abroad, Hill’s books are in my suitcase. I cling to them over the next fifteen months as I half-heartedly try to fit myself back into the contours of a life and a country in which I no longer feel I belong, as I plot my return. When I move back to begin a postgraduate degree, they, too, retrace their journey across the Atlantic. The canal is just as I’d left it; walking the towpath is a homecoming. But Hill has stopped writing poetry. He’s turned to novels, and although I try to love them I somehow can’t. As the years pass I dip into his poems now and then and I can still sense a kindred spirit – a ghost, growing ever fainter.

Only fourteen years later, chancing across a newspaper interview, do I learn that Hill and I have something else in common besides our love for the canal: he, too, is Jewish. And only some years after that will I realise how rare the two of us are, writing about nature, urban or otherwise.

2014

I’ve been walking the Regent’s Canal for years by now, in sun, fog, veils of rain. I’ve kayaked it too, clambering from my boat glazed in duckweed. I know it – or so I think – like the back of my hand.

One Saturday in November I visit the London Canal Museum and I discover how little I really know. In the grand scheme of things, the Regent’s Canal is a bauble, a plaything beside the mighty Grand Union Canal. I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence without having any notion of its course; now I learn that two of its arms link the Regent’s Canal to the Thames in a series of snaky, unruly bends just over 20 miles long. I need no further urging. The next morning I’m on the towpath at Paddington Basin, walking to the Thames by the longest possible route.

The Grand Union has none of the tame prettiness of the western reaches of the Regent’s. At first it’s tough, gritty, obviously industrial. It curls past windswept tower blocks, empty warehouses. Islands of rubbish outnumber waterbirds. There are regular signposts for walkers but no other accoutrements of leisured walking: no waterside pubs, no enticements to linger. London seems, resolutely, to turn its back on the canal.

And then, imperceptibly, the canal grows wilder. To my right stretches the majestic mossy ruin of Kensal Green cemetery; seen from the canal you’d never guess it was still in use, the tombstones crumbling under skeins of ivy and bramble. To my left is a gargantuan Tube depot, an unravelling braid of steel in a sea of gravel, crosshatched by wires.

A few miles on, a mobile drift of snow carpets the towpath and I blink in disbelief. The snow resolves itself into the largest flock of mute swans I’ve ever seen. I edge toward them cautiously – no cygnets in evidence, but I know how quickly swans can shift from regal aloofness to hissing and snapping. They show no inclination to move out of my way. If I try to go round them I’ll end up either in the canal or snagged in brambles. Holding my breath, I wade through a sea of swans and everything changes again. The canal spills out into fields punctuated by scrub, thickets of hawthorn, banks of water-loving willow and alder that gradually condense into low-lying woodland. According to the map I’m still in London. But I know by now that maps can be right and wrong at the same time.

By four o’clock the shadows are fading. The edges of the clouds glow pink. Despite my woollen gloves, my fingers ache. I’m hollow with hunger; there are no blackberries to scrump now, just last summer’s wizened black buttons. I curse my poor planning. How could I have thought I could cover 20 miles in a day in November? Admitting defeat, I turn off the canal path to the nearest Tube station.

Greenford is on the branch of the Central Line that goes to Ruislip, the one that I’ve never had any reason to take. I almost lose my way in the cookie-cutter drabness of the streets. There’s a Polish delicatessen across from the station but fantasies of sinking my teeth into a hunk of poppyseed roll or a slab of apple pie are instantly dashed by the CLOSED sign on the door.

The platform at Greenford is above ground. At the top of the stairs, I find myself standing under a vault of flame and pearl, mackerel clouds stained rose-gold drifting away from the setting sun. Despite cold and hunger part of me wants to stay here until the last light fades, but the temptation of the warm interior of the train is too much. As the doors slide shut behind me, I remember a snippet of wall text from the Canal Museum. I didn’t think to note down its author, but this wise person observed that the joining of the Regent’s Canal and the Grand Union Canal, and their links to the Thames, effectively turn London into an island. An island within an island.

With one last glance at the blazing sky, I let the train carry me inland, away from the canal and into the heart of the Island London that I have made my home.

***

Rachel Sloan an art historian, curator and writer. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she has called the UK – first London, now Kent – home for most of her adult life. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Moxy, Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and Canopy: an anthology of writing for the Urban Tree Festival (2021). Her short stories have been Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize, runner-up in the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition and longlisted (twice) in the 2021 Mslexia Short Story Competition. She was also longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize; 'Canal' is an excerpt from her longlisted book proposal, a nature memoir entitled Taking Root.

On Barra Hill

By Ian Grosz:

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.  
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.

I have lived in northeast Scotland now for many years. It is home, and yet always seems to remain at arm’s length; never quite a place in which I feel I truly belong. I grew up in the northwest of England and spent my early childhood playing in the back alleys of the tightly packed terraced housing of our town; on family days out to Southport and Blackpool; and soggy summer camping holidays in the Lake District. Later we moved to the suburbs where I roamed the playing fields and neighbouring farmland with my friends, taking our BMX bikes far beyond where we were allowed. We knew every patch of ground within a ten-mile radius as intimately as our own homes; named trees and hiding places; invented our own legends and hauntings. Our places lived within us: every track and shortcut; every park and empty house; every field, brook, hill, dip and hollow. No map could be as richly textured as those that we embodied in the landscapes of our young lives. 

Perhaps the need to somehow make a deeper connection with where I live now – to understand and fully realise that connection – is through the lack of this intimate knowing of place that comes from childhood, and born of the experience of being an outsider in a place that I consider to be home. It is home, but I know deep down that I am not from here, not of the place. My connections to it come from circumstance, and my roots go back for only as long as I have lived here; no further. 

Rising up above the village where I live, is Barra Hill; its flattened dome presiding over the immediate landscape.  I have walked the hill many times; have become familiar with its landmarks filled with their hidden histories. In an attempt to get under the skin of the place, I’ve explored these histories; delved into the time held by the hill. 

Close by is the fourteenth-century battle site of Robert the Bruce and his rival John Comyn, part of a bitter fight for the Scottish Crown which led to the formation of a medieval independent Scotland. ‘The Bruce’, as he was known, is said to have directed the proceedings of this battle from a chair-shaped boulder once sited somewhere on the hill’s slopes. This is known as Bruce’s seat, and now sits by the roundabout on the road leading out of the village, complete with a small plaque: a site of half-forgotten story and remembrance; but still reminding us of the long and troubled history between the two nations. 

Earthen walls on the hill’s summit form part of an old fort, built in three phases from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Neolithic stone circles ring the hill’s flanks, while remnant undulations from medieval rig and furrow cultivation give its upper slopes the appearance of a crumpled, grassy carpet. On its far side, an old church houses a seventh-century Pictish symbol stone. The hill tells the story of this small corner of northeast Scotland stretching back to the last Ice Age, but holds much more personal histories too. 

I set off early not long after sunrise to make my way up to the hill through a short section of woodland at its base. Gorse laced with spiders’ webs glisten with dew. Cow parsley and nettles fill the woodland floor and a wren darts amongst the brambles that line the path. The trees of the woods seem to hold the morning: imbue it with a spirit of place and time as I walk beneath their high, heavy branches. A small burn gurgles contentedly through a narrow gulley, running down toward the village where it empties into the larger Meadow Burn. The name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is likely drawn from this burn and the prominent flattened dome of the hill. 

Meldrum is an anglicised conflation of the old Irish meall-droma and the old Scots Gaelic mealldruim, both of which mean ridge of the hill. The ‘Old’ is likely to have a phonetic, elided origin in the Gaelic ‘Alt’ which means the burn, or stream, possibly referencing the Meadow Burn running from the hill toward the edge of the modern village before draining into the nearby River Ury.  Alt Mealldroma therefore appears to be a geographic signifier for the beginnings of what became the modern-day settlement, its literal translation a direct reference to the burn of the ridge of the hill. Learning of this brings the village and its context within the landscape closer to a truer understanding. But it also signals my outsideness, my Englishness: reminds me that the people who named this place so long ago were somehow foreign to me; or rather, coming from a place outside of it, I am in some way foreign to this landscape.

The air is still cold as I emerge onto the open hillside, my breath billowing out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. My eyes seek out a line of trees along a ridge leading to the hill’s summit, silhouetted now against the skyline. I have always been drawn to these trees. Their rootedness reinforces my own sense of place here, brings me closer to a sense of belonging. 

Their silhouettes have seemed familiar since moving here over a decade ago, take me back to my childhood in the northwest of England. They remind me of trees my eye sought out on the bus journey home from school as a boy; a secret marker in the landscape between the school and home known only to me, I imagined; something I held within me that brought me home ahead of the bus. Seeing them after the regimentation and continual tussle of the school day was a signal that home was drawing near. Recognising them in the trees along the ridge leading to the hill now, fills me with nostalgia; a sense of both reassurance and loss. I am simultaneously here and there: where I live now and where I have come from; transported by the ghosting of trees from my childhood.

Finally reaching the summit, there is a definite sense of trespass as I enter the old enclosure, as if the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard against intrusion. The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side, down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now peaceful looking fields filled with ripening crops. The village is visible below, with its old centre dating back to the seventeenth-century; the new houses at its outskirts and the small, modern industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the village by-pass and a passenger-jet traverses the sky in a wide circuit for the airport to the south, as if in slow motion. 

A group of swifts have begun darting and swooping across the open enclosure around me, catching midges and flies on the wing. The orchestra of their flight is a language without words, communicating with a deeper sense within me. It is something that is in me rather than in them; something within me that I recognise in them. It seems connected to the landscape; to the trees along the ridge; the morning light now brightening the fields. Everything around me feels perfectly a part of this place, bound up with the language of the swifts. I am just as much part of this landscape as the swifts are now; as much as the people who once occupied this fort; part of the endless narrative thread of life woven through the land and time, and yet I remain somehow outside of its slow unravelling. 

***

Notes: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (1995, repr. London, Harper Press, 2004), p. 7

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

In my wild urban garden

At the height of summer, Gerry Maguire Thompson is looking back across the year as he works on his forthcoming book Wilding the Urban Garden. In an exclusive extract for Elsewhere, he takes us back to the very beginning, and January in the garden…

Jan 1st 

A cold, bright day. I love watching the diverse life in this wilded garden in the city. It’s remarkable how many species are attracted here, mostly brought about by just getting out of nature’s way. 

Jan 2nd 

Mild weather today. A large bumble bee is visiting the flowers of Mahonia Japonica for nectar. At this time of year it’s got to be a queen – the only one who survives through the winter – needing nourishment to get through the cold months.

I’m sitting in the garden, just quietly observing; it becomes a kind of meditation. For a while it may seem like nothing is going on; but really there is never nothing happening. There’ll be an animal or a bird or an insect doing something, or a new plant that you hadn’t noticed before. And there’ll be sound; the longer you listen the more layers of sound you realise there are. The intricate web of nature is always there and is always amazing in its workings.

Observing this challenges me in how I evaluate what is significant and  worthy of attention. I realise more and more that the everyday and the mundane are in fact extraordinary: the amazingness of the commonplace. The seemingly prosaic or unglamorous species like the sparrow or earthworm or dandelion can reveal itself as charismatic when we give it our full attention. It makes you question the whole concept of what is conventionally charismatic or appealing

Sensing all this, for  this moment of time I suddenly feel that transcendent momentary sense: that nothing could be changed to make anything any better. This is the Tao of wildlife gardening.

Jan 5th 

The sparrows are out in force today, with fine weather after a day or two of rain. I never tire of watching them in the garden. There’s a large and growing flock who seem to never leave the place. All their needs are met here: food, protection, nest-sites, safe roosting – and lots of opportunities to bicker at one another. There is  immense joy to be found in this connexion with the inhabitants of our little wildlife haven and the intimate insights into their lives.

Jan 6th 

A woodmouse (Apodemus Sylvaticus: ‘one who goes abroad among the sylvan glades’) has been popping into the conservatory on the odd sunny day when we have the doors open to the outside, looking for something to eat. 

This little creature tends to look in each day for a couple of days, and is surprisingly undaunted by  our presence. It’s quite happy to move around our feet, picking up whatever bits fall from our plate, as long as we don’t move suddenly.

Jan 7th 

In the late afternoon I notice numbers of redwing gathering in the big ash tree just outside our garden gate; as the sun goes down more and more of them gather until there are well over a hundred. 

Jan 8th 

The redwings are still gathered in the ash tree in large  numbers, now  covering its whole canopy.

Jan 9th 

I look out first thing in the morning to check on the redwings: they’ve  gone. And so has every berry that was on every holly tree in the garden. They probably departed in the middle of the night.

Jan 12th 

The resident male blackbird is stabbing at windfall fruit from the apple tree that have remained intact on the ground into the winter. He’s starting to look glossy and his beak is turning a brighter colour: preparing to defend this very desirable territory, I imagine. 

Jan 14th 

The blackbird is now systematically eating ivy berries all day long; the visiting redwings didn’t take these. 

Jan 16th 

I’ve been watching the sparrows feeding today. It’s mysterious. They often leave a full feeder for hours, while at other times they pounce on it as soon as you put it out. I suppose it could be about the availability of other food sources, but at this time of year there isn’t an excess of other food around.

Jan 18th 

Taking the dog  out for bed-time walk and toiletries last night, I spotted a fox across the road. This one I recognised: a big old dog fox with a woolly face that makes him look like a bear. I’ve seen him around here for a long time, and I know where he lives – under an unused shed at the nearby allotments. He’s wary of people and dogs, which is probably how he got to be big and old. Tonight, as usual, he keeps his distance, then moves away.

Jan 20th 

Two bluetits are forming a promising relationship, hopping round one another on the apple tree when the sparrows are not in evidence – they seem to keep away from those slightly bigger and more assertive birds.

Jan 22nd 

I’m watching the sparrows as they finally settle down to roost in the holly tree as darkness falls. All has gone quiet. Then I notice one bird hop down to the lowest branch of the tree, do a poo, and hop back up to where it was before. Seems like this is sparrow etiquette: you just don’t poo on someone else’s head while they’re asleep. We’ve all been there.

Jan 23rd 

It’s particularly dark this evening, completely overcast. Taking the dog for her night-time outing we encounter a different fox – a lot younger and sleeker than Big Old Bear Fox – and a lot less wary of people and dogs. Has this one taken over the territory?

Jan 25th 

I’m delighted to hear  – from the dog-walking fraternity, who spot more wildlife than everyone else in this neighbourhood – that Big Old Bear Fox is still  around. Maybe he’s been pushed into an adjacent territory – or maybe he’s being tolerated by New Young Fox– maybe as a relative? Maybe even as proposed father to offspring?

Jan 26th 

Big Old Bear Fox and New Young Fox have been seen – together. So now I’m hoping they’re a couple. Sentimentally. I’d be delighted for Big Old Bear Fox to become a father once more…probably for the last time.

Jan 27th 

This evening I heard the first twilight mating-plus-territorial song of the year from the resident male blackbird: it’s beautiful and uplifting as ever. I know this bird is  probably saying, “This is my territory so don’t even think about coming into my space or you’ll seriously regret it” but I never fail to feel joy from listening to it, especially just before dawn and again at dusk. Who knows, perhaps the bird feels joy too: the joy of telling others to **** off? That’s a sentiment I too sometimes experience.

Jan 29th 

Big freeze. Now the ground is covered in hoar frost. Looking out my upstairs window at dawn, I see a dead fox in our next door neighbour’s garden, lying frozen and covered in white frost crystals. The neighbours let me into their garden. I’m pretty sure this is New Young Fox. She clearly didn’t die of hunger, because she’s in otherwise pristine condition. Incredibly beautiful and heartachingly sad.

Jan 31st 

Sun shining warmly today.  First male song-thrush of the year starts singing on the highest tip of the highest holly tree in the garden. Perching on the highest viewpoint in the vicinity – as thrushes are wont to do – and singing your heart out for a long time is a high-risk strategy, and numbers of thrushes are taken this way every year by sparrow-hawks or other birds of prey.

The sparrows are having their first splash of the year in the birdbath, always a joy to watch. They’re so exuberant and noisy that I can’t believe they’re not having a terrific time. My beloved sparrows continue to bring joy, so full of vitality and effervescent chattiness are they in any weather and any time of day. I love listening to them; they sound cheerful and optimistic to me, though I’m also perfectly aware that they’re mostly bitching, arguing, fighting and complaining to one another. I don’t care; cheerfulness, optimism and full-of-life-ness are still the effects their chatter has on me. Anthromorphique, moi? Certainement.

As January draws to close I’m reminded once again of the immense benefits urban wild gardening can bring: to the individual, to the local wildlife, to the cityscape, and indeed to the planet.

***

You can get free advance extracts from Gerry’s book “Wilding the Urban Garden” by signing up at urbanwildgarden.com
The book also has a Facebook page, at facebook.com/UrbanWildGarden 

The Green of Swimming

By Sally Gander:

You slip into the water from the moss-wet shore, the slanted rocks sometimes sharp sometimes smooth beneath your palms as you edge your way deeper. The opening to the cove is white with surf but here the water is glass still and cold enough to make you gasp once, twice, three times, but then your lungs expand, the shiver over your skin rejuvenating against the humidity of the day. 

Your guide has brought you here from the village, trekking past a farm and through a verdant wooded valley where everything was some shade of green except for the dark earth of the path ahead of you, then up onto the cliff top and along and around and down a natural stairway created by layers of rock that have been folded and fractured into steps and gullies, small waterfalls and archways and the cave you swim towards now, the place known as the Witch’s Cauldron.

You want to swim inside but the gap between water and cave roof is too narrow and you imagine the clash of your head against the jagged rock, the witch hiding in the shadows to laugh at this fragile thing she has tempted into her lair.  Your guide beckons you closer to see the light beyond where a giant blow-hole resides and the witch keeps watch over the Cauldron itself.  We’ll be patient, your guide tells you, the tide is turning.

While you wait you touch the rock of the cave mouth, the browns and greens and yellows formed millions of years before humans were conceived, the world exploring its capability, playing with the potential chemistry and physics of the materials she was gifted. You run your fingers down a calcified vein that’s thick as a rope, formed by a rivulet of water, you suppose, but it is vein-like enough to be the back of the witch’s hand reaching over the cliff tops, her fingers deep in the water to find the things she needs for the cauldron, the seaweed and crustaceans and shingling pebbles and small silvery fish that bunch together in glittering camaraderie. 

As she works you lie back and float in the cradling stillness, letting your feet hang, only needing the smallest sweep of your hands to remain in place.  It won’t be long before the cold inches its way deeper into your body, numbing your fingers and toes and cooling your organs, but for now you rest on the rhythm of the tide, glimpsing the rocks and grassy cliff tops that frame the pale blue sky. 

Finally, the witch finishes her work and the tide retreats to her bidding. You return to the cave mouth to find your guide has already swum through, his face shadowed with the light beyond him. He reaches his hand out to you, Take your time, he says, take it slowly.

You touch the damp rock above you, kick your legs to move through the water, feeling the distance between the crown of your head and the cool cave roof, mere inches, sometimes less, and you are captivated by this sensation of buoyancy, of being drawn into the light of unknowingness and how quickly the cave opens up again, the roof now vast above your head and you within the glittering emerald green of the Witch’s Cauldron, smiling at the ease with which you can move into such a place.

You stop here and tread water, gazing at the witch’s creation and the power she has in those veined hands, and how, at other times when the volatile brews are composed and the tide is high, this cauldron becomes a broiling spitting turbulent fusion of white and dark, a culmination of everything the witch knows about the world, the actions and reactions, the people she has loved or been persecuted by, the centuries she has lived and endured and held faith regardless of her trials.

She knows the heat of chemistry that shapes the surface of this earth, the gravity that hugs things close, the movement of water and winds, of plants and trees and animals, of the animal humans who push beyond their natural realm.  She knows the power of the sea in which you swim and she has allowed you to be here.  Perhaps her new brew needed your human scent or the stirring kick of your tender legs, but you feel now that this emerald potion is complete and you are its ingredient as well as its recipient, held spellbound in the completeness of the universe — the sky, the rock, the water, the flesh — the witch holds it all in her palm and when she hands it to you the green glows bright, a green that whispers This is all you will ever need…

***

Sally Gander writes fiction and creative nonfiction.  Her work has appeared in Litro, The Real Story, The Blue Nib and A Word in Your Ear, and is forthcoming in Porridge.  She has also performed for Story Fridays in Bath.  For many years she taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and now teaches students from across the world at Advanced Studies in England. She is currently building a collection of personal essays.

Here, Under the Eaves

By Rebecca Smith:

Our house martins are back. They are rebuilding their nest, having already scraped last years’ mud and feathers away. Repairing and strengthening seems like good practise. I watch them as they swoop and tumble with complete control in the strip of sky between the houses. I live on a young street, only five years old. I count at least twenty houses, here from my front window. There is more brick than branch. More road than grass. But, I remind myself, the street is still in its infancy. We have a lot of growing to do.

I have planted a rowan tree and a red acer on the front lawn, a birch, an apple and a pear tree in the back garden. Every day, I study their progress, note the extra space they take up, expanding their green leaves. For so long nothing seemed to happen, but of course it did. Winter can feel like an age. 

There is no chorus in the morning here yet - the trees are too small, their branches too flimsy for the birds to settle on. I remember, last year, hearing the chirps of the newly hatched house martins in their nest under the eaves and how they chimed with the cooing of my own baby girl. The birds are back, the baby ones now fully grown, and my daughter is saying whole words. 

One day the trees will be big and if I stand here and look out of the window, I’ll see green. Not the rust coloured brick of the mirror image house opposite, or my neighbour silhouetted in the window as he walks from room to room. I look at the rowan tree and wonder what is happening beneath. What is it like down there this time of year? Is there a fuss, a rush, a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude? I hope we have not made it too hard for things to flourish up here. I plant more lavender and sow bean seeds.

The woods that line the edge of the estate are full of creatures. Woodpeckers skip round trunks of trees (my daughter shows her Dad at home, nod nod nodding her head). We find tadpoles that are high and dry, small clumps of them with only the smallest wiggle left in their tails. A robin, who I swear I knew in a previous life, follows our step through the trees. I want them to follow me home, like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. A trail of birds, insects, mammals hoping and jumping up the curb.

Among the houses, nature knows there are different rules. Maybe the house martins are the pioneers. They are showing the rest that it is possible to make a home here. The trees are growing, I promise. I’ll plant more lavender for the bees and make beds for the snap dragons. I’ll leave a gap in the foot of the fence for the hedgehogs. It’s the least I can do.

***

Rebecca Smith is a writer, podcast maker and teacher based in central Scotland. Find out more on her website.