Meadow cranesbill (Geranium pratense)

Dear Readers, as a break from all the bugs, here is what I think of as the quintessential meadow plant, a deep-blue geranium known as meadow cranesbill. Like so many native plants it has a whole raft of pet names, from ‘Jingling Johnny’ and ‘blue basins’ to ‘grace of God’ and ‘Loving Andrews’. In Iceland it was known as ‘Odin’s flower (blue being the colour of Odin’s robe and eyes) and was said to be used to produce a blue dye, although the method is no longer known. It also has associations with St Andrew of Scotland, hence the ‘Loving Andrews’ vernacular name. In the Isle of Man, the plant is known as “Cass-calmane ghorrym” which means ‘blue-dove’s foot’.

Once, meadow cranesbill popped up in hay meadows all over the country, but today it seems to be restricted to places like the cemetery, where the grass is cut intermittently, and to roadside verges. In the North it shows a marked preference for areas with limestone, but in the South it’s much less choosy.

The centre of the plant gives the name ‘cranesbill’ – the central part becomes upright, producing a ‘beak-like pod’ according to Plantlife.

‘Domesticated’ meadow cranesbill ‘Mrs Kendall Clark (Photo One)

Meadow cranesbill was a garden favourite even before Elizabethan times, and many of our domesticated favourites have some of this species in them. ‘Johnson’s Blue is a hybrid of meadow cranesbill and Himalayan geranium, and you can find other hybrids with white or pink flowers, and even with double flowers (though please don’t, as bees love geraniums but not the ones with complicated flowers).

Johnson’s Blue Geranium (Photo Two)

Apparently, in Northumberland meadow cranesbill is known as ‘thunder flower’, and picking it is said to cause bad weather. I wonder if the deep blue of the flowers reminded people of thunder clouds?

On the plus side, the flower was said to be just the thing to help treat dysentery, cholera, diarrhoea, haemorrhoids and nosebleeds, so it was probably worth taking a chance on a soaking.

Meadow cranesbill, like all species geraniums, is great for wildlife: bumblebees love it, especially buff-tailed and red-tailed bumblebees (though the one in the photo below is on viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare) instead).

Red-tailed bumblebee queen (Bombus lapidarius)(Photo Three)

The leaves are often nibbled upon by the larvae of the geranium sawfly (Ametastegia carpini), who produce slot-shaped holes in the foliage. Sawflies are relatives of the wasps but are not social, and are much weaker fliers. The youngsters can certainly do a fair bit of damage – this leaf looks it’s been lace-ified (if that’s even a word).

Geranium leaf after a visit from geranium sawfly larvae (Photo Four)

And finally, because today is a work day and my back is killing me so I no longer want to sit at my desk, here is a poem. This work, by Thomas Clark, has appeared here before, but there is something so meditative about it, and there is so much in it, that I thought it could do with a repeat airing. It’s worth pausing after each ‘verse’, much as the poem does…

Riasg Buidhe

Thomas A. Clark

A visit to the island of Colonsay,
Inner Hebrides, April 1987

There are other lives we might lead, places we might get to know, skills we might acquire.

When we have put distance between ourselves and our intentions, the sensibility comes awake.

Every day should contain a pleasure as simple as walking on the machair or singing to the seals.

The ripples on the beach and the veins in the rocks on the mountain show the same signature.

When we climb high enough we can find patches of snow untouched by the sun, parts of the spirit still intact.

The grand landscapes impress us with their weight and scale but it is the anonymous places, a hidden glen or a stretch of water without a name, that steal the heart.

The mere sight of a meadow cranesbill can open up a wound.

We live in an age so completely self-absorbed that the ability to simply look, to pour out the intelligence through the eyes, is an accomplishment.

You will require a tune for a country road, for hill walking a slow air.

When I climb down from the hill I carry strands of wool and fronds of bracken on my clothing, small barbs of quiet in my mind.

At dawn and again at dusk we feel most acutely the passing of time but at dawn the world is with us while at dusk we stand alone.

The farther we move from habitation, the larger are the stars.

There is a kind of bagpipe and fiddle music, practiced in a gale, which is full of distance and longing.

A common disease of sheep, the result of cobalt deficiency, is known as ‘pine’.

The best amusement in rain is to sit and watch the clouds negotiate the mountain.

Long silences are as proper in good company as a song on a lonely road.

Let everything you do have the clean edge of water lapping in a bay.

In any prevailing wind there are small pockets of quiet: in a rock pool choked with duckweed, in the lee of a cairn, in the rib-cage of a sheep’s carcass.

When my stick strikes a stone, it is a call to order.

The most satisfying product of culture is bread.

In a landscape of Torridonian sandstone and heather moor, green and gold lichens on the naked rock will ignite small explosions of sensation.

Whatever there is in a landscape emerges if we just sit still.

It is not from novelty but from an unbroken tradition that real human warmth can be obtained, like a peat fire that has been rekindled continuously for hundreds of years.

After days of walking on the moor, shoulders, spine and calves become resilient as heather.

The hardest materials are those which display the most obvious signs of weathering.

We can carry a tent, food, clothing or the world on our shoulders, but how light we feel when we lay them down.

Just to look at a beach of grey pebbles can cool the forehead.

On a small island, the feeble purchase that the land obtains between the sea and the sky, the drifting of mist and the intensity of light, unsettles the intellect and opens the imagination to larger and more liquid configurations.

Although the days should extend in a graceful contour, the hours should not be accountable.

A book of poems in the rucksack – that is the relation of art to life.

On a fine day, up on the heights, with heat shimmering from the rocks, I can stretch out on my back and watch all the distances dance.

The duty of the traveller, wherever he finds himself, is always to keep faith with the air.

We should nurture our own loneliness like an Alpine blossom.

Solitude and affection go well together – to work alone the whole day and then in the evening sit round a table with friends.

To meet another person on a walk is like coming to a river.

In the art of the great music, the drone is eternity, the tune tradition, the performance the life of the individual.

It is on bare necessity that lyricism flourishes best, like a cushion of moss campion on granite.

When the people are gone, and the house is a ruin, for long afterwards there may flourish a garden of daffodils.

The routines we accept can strangle us but the rituals we choose give renewed life.

When the lark sings and the air is still, I sometimes feel I could reach over and take the island in my hand like a stone.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Hardyplants – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23549950

Photo Two by Normanack at https://www.flickr.com/photos/29278394@N00/547634579

Photo Three By Ivar Leidus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49758226

Photo Four from https://www.naturespot.org.uk/species/geranium-sawfly

Tree Fern in Postman’s Park

Dear Readers. I have always had a great fondness for Postman’s Park, which is is today the churchyard for St Botolph’s church, Aldersgate. You enter the park past a venerable plane tree, wander over to check if the handkerchief tree is in flower (it isn’t) and pause to admire the tree ferns. But the real interest of Postman’s Park is not so much botanical as human – it’s the site of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, the idea of George Frederic Watts, opened in 1900. Watts himself died in 1904 with only 4 plaques installed, but his widow Mary Watts took charge of the memorial subsequently. The park is right next door to the original headquarters of the  General Post Office (which has a statue of Rowland Hill, the inventor of the Penny Post outside it to this day). The Post Office workers used to take their lunch in the park, hence its popular name of ‘Postman’s Park’.

The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice ({Photo One)

This is a unique spot, which both celebrates the heroism of ordinary men and women and is simultaneously a memorial of its time. I rather love the colonial overtones of this plaque, for example. ‘A Foreigner’ indeed!

And I think that this is an accident unlikely to happen in present-day Hyde Park (though a runaway electric scooter is a definite possibility)

There are many, many incidents involving fires: sometimes house fires, sometimes terrible events where a dress or other clothing was set alight by a naked flame used for heating or lighting. The advent of electric lighting must have been such a change to people’s way of life.

And tales of child heroism were particularly popular with the Victorians. Did Charles Dickens create this, I wonder, or was he just reflecting the Victorian view of children?

And if it wasn’t fire, it was water. People were falling through the ice, drowning in lakes, drowning in canals.

But people still are drowning, and the most recent plaque, installed in 2009 after a gap of 78 years, commemorates Leigh Pitt, who rescued a nine-year-old child from the lake at Thamesmead but drowned himself. The Diocese of London have said that they’ll now consider other heroic acts for inclusion on the memorial, which sounds like a good thing to me – there’s plenty of space, and heroism is still alive and well. It’s easy to be amused by the tone of some of the plaques, but each of these people did an extraordinary thing, ignoring their own safety in order to save someone else. Aren’t these acts the very best of us? It makes me think of all the people who have risked their own safety during the pandemic, of the doctors and nurses and care staff going to work with inadequate PPE, knowing that if they caught Covid they stood a good chance of being sick or even dying. It’s very difficult to leave Postman’s Park in anything but a contemplative mood.

Dear Readers, I’d like to say that anniversaries and birthdays and such become easier as time goes on, but it wouldn’t be absolutely true. This is the second Fathers’ Day since Dad died in March 2020, and although I try to ignore it, I still feel it in the pit of my stomach when the first signs for cards with pictures of golf players and beer tankards appear in the shops. It seems to me that our idea of masculinity on Fathers’ Day comes down to armchairs and slippers, cricket bats, DIY and the occasional watering can, or at least that’s what Hallmark would seem to believe. Where’s the room for what a father can really mean, I wonder? At any rate, I like to imagine that these two collared doves, cuddled up together on one flimsy twig at the top of a hawthorn, are parent and child. I’m sure the one at the front looks a bit fluffier and less well-defined than the one behind. I have a growing appreciation for these tender little birds, with their soft plumage that shades from grey to tan without any noticeable gradation. Ombre fabrics are very in this year, and collared doves have that look nailed.

The angelica is still full of bees, but these are the last few heads. Soon it will all be over, for the year and possibly for this plant, as they’re usually biennial. Still hopefully lots of babies will pop up. And I have my eye on an Angelica gigas for next year, they’re purple and apparently even bigger. So many of the plants that work well in the garden – foxgloves, honesty, teasel, and this big brute – are biennials, which means that you have to plan in advance if you want them every year.

And then I have a look by the side of the pond, where I planted some species geraniums. These are doing pretty well but I see the tell-tale  twisting stems of bindweed popping up, and so I start to do some clearing. An adult frog leaps into the pond and then looks around with an aggrieved expression. But how about this little one, smaller than my little fingernail?

It’s been a wet couple of days, and all the froglets are taking advantage of the dampness to leave the pond, though I still seem to have a fair few tadpoles. I always wonder where they go, these little ones, but at the moment every time I move a plant they explode out from underneath it like popcorn. So much new life! It’s cheering to see things going on as normal, the world turning. When the heron came to the pond a few years ago and systematically ate every frog it could find, I imagined that there would be a hiatus in the frog population, but not a bit of it – they had recovered even within the year. What is a personal tragedy for an individual frog matters not a whit to nature, who carries on regardless, rebalancing and compensating. Dad and Mum are gone, and yet life goes on, dragging me along in its wake. Like plants, we are always turning towards the light.