Category: Posts of Note
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Wal Davies
My lovely dad, Wal Davies, died on August 12th, aged 89. Dad was a gentle, smart, and incredibly silly man. He was a jazz musician of extraordinary talent: from a teenager . . . to his final years. Dad loved the music deeply and unconditionally, as he loved so many things: . . .me and…
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Each to their own
Good morning, people, it’s your happy-go-lucky labrador-friend BOB here. All of us have our favourite summer activities, and BEACH is a great place to enjoy them. Would you like to come with BOB and see? BEACH is BOB’s happy place, as it is, I think, for many humans who live here in Kintyre. Kintyre humans…
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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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pink pink!
I really enjoyed the discussion of yesterday’s rose / pink post. In the comments, we heard about different words for this colour in Dutch (Titia), Armenian (Annie), Finnish (Helen) and Hindi, Tamil and Gujarati (Deepa). Rebecca told us about how she’d been instructed that the liturgical vestments worn on Gaudete Sunday are definitely rose, and…
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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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evocative ermine
I find our responses to colour endlessly fascinating. It’s amazing how, by simply looking at an object, we can so immediately use its palette to visualise another object that might share the same distinctive colouring. And there’s much more to this process than the brain simply using colour to awaken a neural association between two…
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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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You see grēne where I see grœg
Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me. In both the Ravelry group and newsletter comments, many of you suggested that you do not see Chingly as I do – as a greenish-grey – but as very definitely green. Others described Chingly as sludgy, brown,…
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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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Knitting Bullshit
My theme today is Knitting Bullshit and before I begin, I had better explain to you what I understand bullshit to be. In what follows, “bullshit” is used very much in the sense that Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes in his seminal essay, On Bullshit (1986; 2005). For Frankfurt, bullshit is an utterance with “a…
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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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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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Recuperation
Hello all, it’s Tom here and I’m writing to let you know that Kate is very unwell at the moment. She will be taking time away from her work in order to rest and focus on her health and recuperation. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing her well in her recovery. For those in…
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