Books Do Furnish A Room

Momijigari revisited

Some pure self indulgence here – my Dorset garden is awash with beech leaves, smothering the lawn, blocking the gutters and shrouding the bare bushes, caught in cobwebs and swirling constantly down in the wind.  I love them, glistening in russet and gold when wet, crisp, browner and yellower when dry, and I have just assembled a few pictures of the mother tree and the leaves it is shedding.  Some I have played with in the photo-editor – I think they’re fun, but if it’s a bit too much like Ikea art, I apologise!

 

Dorset miscellany

In Dorset for a week, as autumn threatened winter - then let summer back for a day.  So a miscellany of photographs - first, my winter's supply of logs has arrived; then a fantastic view of a raven on the Dorset cliffs a little east of Lyme Regis - so close and still I could hardly believe my luck (and we also had wonderful views of hunting kestrel); third and fourth, my Aga having its annual service - the poor old dear is showing her age (late 1940s or early 1950s), but still gives sterling service (though soon after this photograph she malfunctioned badly, sending flames leaping out of the front and up towards the ceiling - now waiting for the doctor to come); and finally, a beautiful small copper butterfly on some late bramble flowers - it was constantly bullied off them by a crowd of much larger painted ladies.  A glorious summer day gave me the birds and the butterflies, in the same week I prepared for the coming frosts.

 

Goat Song

Brad Kessler and his wife leave New York for Vermont, and they raise goats.  From being complete beginners, they are soon breeding them successfully, collecting a lot of milk all through the summer, and making a range of cheeses.  These experiences are captured in Goat Song, published earlier this year.  (Not to be confused with several other books of the same or similar names, including Chantal Pelletier's Goat Song, a Montmatre Murder thriller!).  I enjoyed Kessler's book, and I would warmly recommend it, perhaps particularly to American readers, but also to anyone interested in cheese making (!) or, more generally, the ideas of moving to the country, producing food by hand and on a small, local scale, and the issues of quality and variety in a world used to uniformity and national scale.

The Kesslers fence an area of pasture and orchard in a newly acquired small farm, then buy a couple of young Nubian goats, and a couple of kids.  They are rather beautiful creatures, famous for their rich milk, and they quickly become used to their new home.  They establish a pecking order, and Brad and his wife Dona soon learn to recognise their individual voices.  They take them herding, effectively long slow walks in the woods – they are browsers not grazers – and each animal, individually belled tinkles or chimes slowly from the woods while Brad reads and dreams.  They come at his call, and are affectionate and pretty trouble free.

Kessler describes the joys of getting the hay in, of the different hays that result from different crops or even different times of year; he describes the threat from coyotes (which he deals with by tracking them and urinating on their faeces to let them know that he is challenging their mastery of the woods!); he describes the rituals of mating and the struggles of a difficult birth; of learning to milk; and of nursing a goat through a severe parasitic illness which affected the animal's nervous system.  He describes the seasonal joys of farming, the worry and the joy; the disappointment of having to sell some of the kids and the warm pleasure of passing on their enthusiasm and growing skill.

And he describes making cheese – the very young and almost immediate faisselles (named after the containers they're strained in), a range of chevres, a mozzarella, and a Pyrenean tomme of matured cheese.  He explains that the cheese has, like wine and olive oil, a distinctive taste which reflects the season, the geology and the fodder – a terroir all its own.  He describes the clean tastes and additive free milk he drinks daily, the perfect cheeses – and that he could be thrown in jail for selling either in the US, as they are unpasteurised.  This is not an ideal life, but it is a very rewarding one, and – while I would never go this route myself – one with which I feel great sympathy.

Goat language:

• ‘capricious’ refers to the goats' choosy browsing, picking preferred plants out of the hay and leaving others;
• from the descriptions of the adult billy goats, the expression ‘randy old goat’ has more than a hint of truth in it; 
• ‘kicking the bucket’ and ‘crying over spilled milk’ while not exclusively to do with goats, refer to the not uncommon accident where a irritated goat kicks over, or steps in, the bucket of milk she has just yielded, rendering it worthless;
• kidnapping;
• tragedy, from the Greek, 'cry of the goat'
• and (thanks for the reminder, Glo), scapegoat, the goat sacrificed to atone for the sins of the community.

Pondlife

I have built a pond in my Dorset garden – stripped turf from the lawn, dug through loam, clay with flints; lined the hole with fleece and butyl, and filled the whole – and the hole – with water.  Put in plants, turfed the banks – and am already entranced by watching raindrops splash, leaves fall in and drift aimlessly.  Weeks, months and years will bring much more life, but even on the first day, a cat came to drink, and a dragonfly hovered over.

Mrs Cornflower and Lady Croom

Cornflower is troubled by her husband's violent assault on the garden, which she fears may destroy more than it creates.  She should read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which while it will not give much comfort, will amuse enormously, and set her worries in a wider historical context.  It's a positive marvel of a play (why no plays in the Cornflower Book Group?), and it's just being revived in London at the moment.

Lady Croom has a lovely garden.  But her husband has invited in Richard Noakes, a landscape architect, to "improve" it.  Read, and weep:

Lady Croom: Your drawing is a very wonderful transformation. I;would not have recognized my own garden but for your ingenious book - is it not? - look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars.

Noakes:   (Bleating) Lord Little has one very similar -

Lady Croom:  I cannot relieve Lord Little's misfortunes by

adding to my own.  Pray, what is this rustic hovel that presumes to superpose itself on my gazebo?

Noakes: That is the hermitage, madam.

Lady Croom: I am bewildered

Brice: It is all irregular, Mr Noakes.

Noakes: It is, sir. Irregularity is one of the chiefest principles of the picturesque style.

Lady Croom:  But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short, it is nature as God intended. 

 

… … …  

 

Lady Croom:  Mr Noakes!
Noakes: Your ladyship -
Lady Croom:  What have you done to me!
Noakes: Everything is satisfactory, I assure you.  A little behind, to be sure, but my dam will be repaired within the month -
Lady Croom: (Banging the table) Hush!
           (In the silence, the steam engine thumps in the distance.)
Can you hear, Mr Noakes?
Noakes: (Pleased and proud) The Improved Newcomen steam pump - the only one in England!
Lady Croom:  That is what I object to.  If everybody had his own I could bear my portion of the agony without complaint.  But to have been singled out by the only Improved Newcomen steam pump in England, this is hard, sir, this is not to be borne.
Noakes: Your lady -
Lady Croom: And for what?  My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp.  What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine.  (Pointing through the window)  What is that cowshed?
Noakes: The hermitage, my lady?
Lady Croom: It is a cowshed.
Noakes: Madam, it is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney -
Lady Croom: And who is to live in it?
Noakes: Why, the hermit.

Lady Croom: Where is he?

Noakes: Madam?
Lady Croom: You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?
Noakes: Indeed, madam -
Lady Croom: Come, come, Mr Noakes.  If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water.  What hermits do you have?

 Good luck, Cornflower!

Jordan: rags and rocks

In Jordan recently, I was able to buy some fine textiles, and a couple of pieces of jewellry which caught my eye.  First, a fine woollen rug, woven in three long pieces and then stitched together with great heavy ribs - perfect for a wooden floor in the country.  Then some cushion covers, silk embroidery of elegant and charming trees, and a simpler cotton pattern, too.  Then the jewellry, a necklace and a bracelet.

 

 

 

 

 

Walking the plank

In my Dorset cottage, a big step forward at the end of last year was the laying of a new floor in the sitting room.  A badly laid and horrible dirty pink carpet, and the painted (black, if you please) pine boards came up, and oak went down.  To see the clean pale oak go down was to see the room get bigger and lighter, and when it was lacquered, the beautiful grain came up magnificently. This was not a straightforward job, as the joists underneath proved to be in a terrible mess, some rotten, some badly repaired or extended, so I decided to replace all of them as well.  It delayed the project, and hurt my wallet, but it will be well worth it in the longer term.  Here are a few pictures to take you through the process!

A view of the sea

I have never agreed with the artist Mr Deacon, who did not want to see the sea because it disturbed him - a nervousness for which Freudian analysis would now certainly be available (however meaningless that might be).  But since childhood, when I lived only half a mile or so from a major estuary, and walked there everyday with the dogs, I have never actually lived all that close to the sea.  I miss it, and go to rivers and the sea as often as I can, but two recent purchases for my wall have compensated slightly!

They are completely different, but have a superficial unity; they are both monochrome prints, both of the wild west coast of the British Isles - but one is full of soft tones and large views of sea and sky; the other is harder, more severely black and white, but more intimate in scale and subject.

The first is Judith Lockie's Drawing In The Hebrides, a detail of which is at the head of this post, and a complete version is below.  It's an idiosyncratic shape, reflecting the rocks of the subject, and it has a childlike quality which I rather like - particularly the boat and birds in the mouth of the bay.  It is notable than the severer colour pattern is of the softer, more human subject.  Judith is based in Suffolk, a world away from this violent, rocky coast - her own seas will be larger, softer, flatter and mudier - though no less violent in poor weather.  I bought this at the Royal Academy this year, but there is little of her work on the web that I can see, though you'll find a few things here.  There seem to be some Japanese influences, and a hint of something more modern and more continental in the handling of the figure?

The second print is by Norman Ackroyd whose large body of work you can see on the website - great stuff from all over England, but also the fierce coasts of Ireland and Scotland.  This is Blasket Islands, County Kerry, and I love the space and the softness, combined with the very edgy sea.  I haven't been to the Blaskets, but I know the coast pretty well, and its wonderfully atmospheric.

He creates a quite different feel - one which is modern, but seems to recall nineteenth century models.  Whereas the sea in Lockie's print is homely, human, and a friend or partner in the business of life, the Ackroyd seems to emphasise impersonal scale and remoteness.  Far from no man being an island, Arnold has a harsher view:

And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

Black beauty

Black flowers - purple really, but full of dangerous intensity, sinister and gorgeous in my shabby garden.

And a seasonally inappropriate quotation from T S Eliot, just to show that I could find "hollyhocks" in Four Quartets!

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

Snow and sunshine

The garden, in a few days, went from an ephemeral but lovely blanket of snow to renewed flowering.  After the cherry and the clematis were over, I had some colour in the pond, and the fothergilla promising that spring is not defaulting on the promissory note of a few weeks ago.  Here are some pictures to show the contrast.

From the top - if the pix come out in order, they sometimes don't, they are:

my owl, snow capped and wise, presiding over all that goes on in the garden

camellia in the snow

fothergilla in the snow

.. and a week later in flower, complete with one of the common hover flies, probably Syrphus ribesii

and finally, two pond plants, water hawthorn, or Aponogeton distachyos, and water marigold, or Caltha palustris.

Brorches and liggers

Reading Roger Deakin's Wildwood recently, I noted with particular glee a description of the complex process of thatching, with its wonderful vocabulary.  And only a week later, I was staying in a Dorset pub, the excellent Anvil Inn, which was mid-way through being re-thatched, though sadly with imported Ukrainian reed, not the superior Norfolk variety.  I took the opportunity to go up on the roof and have a closer look!

The old thatch is not completely always removed, so you see old grey thatch being gradually overlaid by the new, yellower reed.

Bundles of reed are laid in place, but tightly, and are secured by various pieces of hazel (willow in the Midlands, more flexible but not so long lasting).  The hazel is cut in the winter, as the sweet sap in the summer wood attracts woodworm, clearly a bad idea in a roof you want to last for thirty years or more.

Hazel rods are split lengthways - try doing that with a billhook on your knee without doing yourself an injury - and cut to different lengths and some twisted to provide scissor sprung clips over the thatch and the horizontal poles.  You can see this all quite clearly in my pictures, though it looks much less secure than it actually is - neither man nor gale will easily shift this roof when it's complete.

The horizontal pieces are, apparently, liggers, and the sprung twisted hazel clips are called brorches, at least in Suffolk.  The great OED knows not brorches, but they are also known as sprays in the Chilterns, buckles in Worcestershire, spars in the south-west, and spekes in Wiltshire.  What words, I could be drunk on them!  Whatever they are called, you can see them below, holding the ligger down on the thatch.

The OED does know ligger however, and offers no less than seven definitions, all quite different; Call My Bluff will never be the same again.  A ligger is:  a coverlet, a scaffolding timber, a horizontal branch in a laid hedge, an hazel thatching strip, the nether millstone, a plank bridge across a drain, a line and bait for pike fishing, one who puts the wool on the carding machine, or a gatecrasher of parties.  What a cornucopia of words and meaning we have here.

But the important thing is the thatch roof, warm, dry and cosy.  It looks soft and snug from a distance, but the cut ends are harsh and unwelcoming; reed thatch is much less plagued, therefore, by birds nesting and mice than cereal straw like wheat or barley.

Zebra crossing

I know there are some readers who are practical and creative people, and I thought you might like a look at my new rug, a proud acquisition from Namibia.  These rugs are woven by native people to a very high standard, from the wool of the karakul sheep - bizarrely, I believe this is an Afghan breed - incorporating motifs from traditional life and the natural world around them.  It feels quite physical and nubbly, and I particualrly like the asymmetry, the way the zebra motif is not quite central in the rug.  I bought it without having a home for it, as it's three foot by about eight, but it found its own place on a blue-green carpet in one of the upstairs rooms (displacing another rug, which started a musical chairs not yet resolved!).

When I got back to the UK, I took this through the red channel and paid duty - much to the apparent surprise of the officer on duty.  The last picture is perversely setting the long lines of the rug at an angle, just for fun: it wouldn't work on the floor, but I think this quite effective.  I expect Cornflower to start knitting her own version shortly!  By the way, I saw lots of real zebras, too.

Garden blues: the patient begins to recover

When I had my little town garden designed, about 10 years ago, it was very beautiful and very much under control.  But I have moved things occasionally, to repair a failure or improve a sightline; somethings have thrived ridiculously - and some have crashed and burned (normally the ones where my garden designer said they were indestructible, of course).  But the really intense preparation of the site - lots of deep digging and soil enrichment, and a wonderfully warm aspect, meant that some things grew much, much bigger than foreseen.  This crowded out other, weaker things.

One odd outcome of this is that I have a lot of late winter and spring colour, and quite a lot of autumn and winter interest, but there's a deadish time around July and early August.  We will come out of it, and there is stuff to see, but it needs a bit of finding and looking at, often up close - its not great impressionistic washes of colour you can see from the house.  These pictures give some idea of the colour I've got now - but its a jungle out there!

At the top is a lovely leggy plant with delicate white flowers - quite common in gardens, but I can't identify it.  Any suggestions?  Below are the coarse and vulgar rudbeckia and the delightful blue flowers of a ceratostigma (which is bidding for border dominance, and which, with the Jerusalem Sage, has to be viciously cut back every year - which probably just encourages it!)

Then the aforementioned Jerusalem Sage, (phlomis fructicosa, previously featured with bee a few days ago), and a rampant jasmine.

Finally, two less conventional splashes of colour - a clematis which normally finishes flowering months ago, but which has had a rebirth on just a few shoots - and the lovely warm red of a photinia leaf caught in the fountain in my pond.  Although this looks autumnal, this is the colour of the spring growth, which has kept remarkably well.

This post is a bit like the garden itself, splashes of colour in a disordered and rather messy way.  But I have always preferred the wildness and the unplumbed pools to the neat clipped hedges!

Acanthus

The acanthus in the garden is looking very fine just now, although the subtle colours don't always seem easy to capture in a photograph!  But in big clumps massed around the pond, they're very fine. This one is acanthus mollis.

The leaves are very beautiful, too, and are often found in Greek architecture, most notably in Corinthian pillar capitals.

Box

Box is an unusual wood; it is very dense, hard, and fine grained.  So the wood of the mature tree - or its roots - is excellent for wood engraving, making precise, robust mathematical instruments and the like.  Of course, immature, clipped and managed trees are common in topiary, in which the wildness and toughness of the tree is lost completely.  The wood is so dense that it sinks in water, the only European wood with this characteristic.

I recently bought an engraving by Howard Phipps at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, printed from boxwood.  The engraving is only 8" x 6" or so (an engraving is made on the surface exposed when the wood is cut at right angles to the grain, so only small pieces are available - but the fineness and toughness of the wood allows great precision in the work - the detail to the left is about life size).  It is called Melbury Beacon and has a lovely eighteenth century feel to it, shades almost of Samuel Palmer.

Chiswick House, which I wrote posted on briefly a few days ago, has some simple box hedges in one of the formal gardens, but I could not get a really good photograph of a wild, gnarled, slightly tortured box tree - though one can see them easily enough in parts of southern England, notably Box Hill in Surrey.

And, to follow my habit and joy, now to finish with something completely irrelevant: boxty is an Irish word, for a bread made of raw grated potatoes and flour.

Another hanging

Here is another recent print, an engraving by  Jane Lydbury.  It's small but very fine, and is a celebration of the machinery of a Shakespearean theatre. Its full of detail - notice the devils at the top, for example.

And talking of hanging, do you know the balled Hughie Graeme?  Isn't it wonderful - I came to it through June Tabor's album, An Echo of Hooves.

Hanging committee

I've been buying quite a few things for the house recently - all decorative, not utilitarian - and you may have seen my Chinese lacquer a few days ago.

This has included quite a few prints, which has necessitated a bit of rehang in the house.  Two of them are by Aimee Birnbaum, an American artist who exhibits at Greenwich and at Southbank Printmakers, where I found a lot of interesting work by her and others - part of the newly revitalised South Bank.

The first is Spirits of the Dance, pandering to one of my passions, and the second is called Lovers' Cavalcade - I have shown the whole print and a small detail of two delightful horses - is this land or sea over which they fly?

Precious china

After a year away - and two years before that not living in my London house - I have been catching up on buying things, and am giving my house a bit of a smarten up (well, I'm not, but I'm really thinking about it!) and adding to my modest collections of this and that.  Two recent additions are two pieces of Chinese lacquer, which I love for their deep reds and golds which are somehow multi-layered and ambiguous.  These two pieces are a late 19th/early 20th century dried fruit bowl about nine inches high, and a 19th century Jiaojiang food basket with delicate cane handles, about 12 inches in diameter - fancy taking your sandwiches to work in that gorgeous thing! They're lovely, but also very affordable - an equivalent English piece in wood or ceramics might cost many times what I paid for these. And they are cheap compared with my book bill!

And, believing as I do, that nothing furnishes a room like books, I wondered what Chinese literature I had on my shelves - not counting Kai Lung, of whom I think you have had enough recently. I found to my shame that the cupboard is not well stocked, but here are three little gems of utterly different styles and genres to ponder on.

First, Monkey by Wu Ch'Eng En, an almost structureless adventure story based on an ancient Chinese fable, but written in the sixteenth century, about a monkey (and his friends Pigsy and Sandy!)who becomes a great god and magician, and has a whole series of picaresque adventures, both human and divine.  Great fun, an amazing satire on all sorts of things (including bureacracy and heaven), and lots of great stories, but a book for dipping into and reading like a box of chocolates. If it sounds twee, it's not - but it isn't philosophy either.

Next, Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine, for afficionados  of murder mysteries. I didn't realise you could write a murder story in modern China, but Xiaolong has produced a story of the Communist Party, corruption and betrayal, in modern Shanghai.  He has also created a really engaging, humane and lovely detective, Chen, as will keep you engaged throughout without any of the conscious effort that you sometimes have to make reading books set in an utterly strange milieu.

And finally, a Nobel prize winner, Gao Xingjian, and his short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather.  The back cover reviewer notes Gao's "understated, expressive concision", and that sums up his writing beautifully. The collection includes six stories, spread over only 160 spacious pages, and they are gossamer gentle, poignant and illuminating.  Gao was born in 1940, and burned much work during the Cultural revolution, so his work is not extensive, but includes two novels (Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible) an a couple of plays. I haven't read any of them, but I'd love to hear from anyone who has.  In very different ways, both Death of a Red Heroine and Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather adddress the dramatic changes going on in China, but whereas one is a fierce grapple with an elusive truth, these stories are a meditation.  I'm sure the same changes are producing lots of interesting writing if we only knew.

Tiny invasion

Over the past weekend or so, the tadpoles have been turning into frogs in my garden pond, seen here complete with guardian owl, carved from beech, and fountain.  They're getting everywhere - there are literally hundreds of them, many sadly destined to fall prey to accidents of one sort or another - being eaten by birds and cats will account for many.  When I cleaned my pond this morning, there were no less than eight frogs on a single submerged plant.  But the real joy was to see all the varieties of froglet jumping around, making their bids for freedom.  Some seem to stay close to water, some move away immediately to seek new adventures.  Some have lost their tails before they emerge, some have quite a tadpole tail on them even at the point of coming out.  The pictures below might give you some idea of the size and delicacy of these tiny animals (excellent, by the way, for pest control in the garden - especially when they grow up, no slug or snail is safe!)

This one was quite happy walking around out of the water, but has a long tail still; I rescued him from my weed bucket and put him back in the water, where he was quite relaxed while I took this portrait.

This chap is fully formed, with a hint of a stumpy tail, but tiny - that's part of my thumb in the background!

Just in case you didn't believe me!

And another one, with a 5 pence piece.

Back to books later, but for now, Jeremy Fisher is off to lunch - but not slugs and snails.