Category: The Great Outdoors
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the rose is obsolete
Some more rose poetry for you today. These verses are taken from William Carlos Williams’ famous collection Spring and All (1923) and it is fascinating to me that all of the poetry I’ve included in these posts date from the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. In poetry, this was a time when…
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Sea Rose
In spring and summer, the lanes and field margins of South Kintyre are awash with flowers: primroses and bluebells, cow parsley and campion. Each is lovely, and each has its season: midsummer being the time for nodding ox eye daisies and fragrant roses. Because I’m thinking a lot about roses at the moment, I’ve noticed…
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I see you, Rose
Perhaps for no poet did the rose serve as a more powerful motif than Rainer Maria Rilke. As he lay dying in 1926, he composed the epitaph which was later inscribed on his gravestone: rose, oh reiner widerspruch, lust,niemandes schlaf zu sein unter soviel lider rose, o pure contradiction, desireto be no one’s sleep beneath…
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The name of the rose
We inherited several roses in the mill garden and, never having grown them before, I’ve been trying to identify and learn about roses and their needs. In some cases this is quite simple. “Rhapsody in Blue“, for example, is an immediately recognisable cultivar, not only because of its its open blooms of a most unusual…
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Roses and pinks
It is rose season here in the mill garden, and I have the colour of roses on my mind. Because it is so loved, and because it has been so widely cultivated for such a very long time, perhaps no flower has the ability to soak up cultural meaning quite as much as the rose.…
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Meconopsis blue
Those of you who enjoyed seeing the emergence of my Himalayan blue poppy in 2025 may be interested to know how it has fared this year. The poppy began flowering on May 18th (almost exactly the same day as 2025) and is still doing so today, June 9th (carrying its final bloom alongside six healthy…
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Gloamin’ Yorlin
Good morning, we have another lovely Yorlin, in a rather different hue, to inspire you today. Here’s Maylin, in her natural habitat on a Cumbrian fellside (by Angle Tarn), wearing her Gloamin’ Yorlin. Maylin says: “I don’t wear a lot of purple, but I chose the Gloamin’ shade of Milarrochy Tweed for my Yorlin as…
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Breaking away
I am currently reading Anne Goldgar’s excellent Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), a book which is perhaps less about tulips themselves than about what they represented in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. Much like the balloon-o-mania of the 1780s, for this era’s moral commentators, tulips were emblematic of what they…
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Mary Moser’s tulips
As I was looking for images of “broken” tulips in historic collections the other day, I happened across a series of watercolour studies in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which were the work of Mary Moser. Moser was an interesting eighteenth-century artist, who, because she specialised in botanical subjects, has often been dismissed in the…
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a broken tulip
“Come quickly,” I said to Tom, “and bring the camera. We’ve got a broken tulip.” “a broken tulip?” “Yes! A broken one! Just check it out!” “Hmm. It certainly looks like a freaky tulip” “It is freaky! In fact, a tulip that has broken in this particular colour combination is actually known as a bizarre.”…
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Knitting Wester Ross
The book is out, all pre-ordered copies have been shipped (thank you, Kate C and Kendall) and club members can access the full e-book in your Ravelry libraries. Knitting Wester Ross is now available to purchase in the KDD shop and by way of celebration, I thought I’d reproduce the book’s introduction here today. This…
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“Peppermintstick”
Tulip season has arrived – hurrah! I anticipate several happy weeks, in which I savour and enjoy every variety that I carefully chose and planted last November. I have several lasagne-style tulip pots at the front of the house, as well as a sizeable display round the back . . . . . . and…
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Concrete Legacies
We are anticipating the publication of Knitting Wester Ross today, and the team is ready (and waiting) in the KDD warehouse to begin the process of shipping the book out to club members, before putting it on general sale. This interim – between the completion of a book and its publication – is often a…
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Cornish break
Hello! We are home after a short break in south-east Cornwall: a beautiful part of the world which neither Tom nor I had visited before. We enjoyed some lovely spring weather and several long days of great walking, along different sections of the south-west coastal path. I became slightly obsessed with Cornish Hedges – the…
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helle-bore-us
Warning: this missive contains more helle-boring content! After learning about hellebores and their nectaries I was left wondering at what point, in the history of science, the crucial role these structures played in pollination had been understood. How had early botanists looked at hellebores? How had hellebores been represented in botanical art and illustration? Some…
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Helle-bore
One of the things I love about gardening is the experience it enables of what Buddhists refer to as Beginner’s Mind: I am very much a beginner gardener, and the fact that I inherited my garden means that, over the past two years, I’ve often found myself in a state of confused un-knowing, having to…