186. The last colours

Red and gold in the autumn sunshine.

Nov 23, 2024

In which Rebecca plays with colour and words and signs up both for hibernation and an art course.

I’ve been playing with my new paintbox this week! It’s the Derwent Line & Wash Paint Pan set (not an affiliate link) which is a curated collection of twelve colours taken from three different ranges. Other media used in this painting include coloured pencil, ballpoint pens in four colours, Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons and watersoluble black ink. Oh, and probably some other stuff too, because I subscribe to the ‘more is more’ approach to art! 😉

Dear Reader,

The weather is all over the place at the moment, but this morning dawned bright and bold, its rare golden light and blue sky giving a welcome pause from the grey which the garden has been wearing like a musty overcoat.

On a bright day like this, gathering the fallen leaves of our liquidambar has felt more of a pleasure than a chore. Although the last leafy hurrahs are holding tight, of those beneath the tree only a few fallen flutters remain after my efforts to scoop deep drifts of red and gold from the tired ground.

Winter is not here yet, but it’s coming. And Reader, hibernation is calling, sending me into giddy temptation for everything the restive season represents: reflection, chilling out without the chill, contemplating quiet, counting down to the end of the year.

In this strange time of opening the curtains every day to a non-view of total darkness, and with evening still catching me unawares in the middle of the afternoon, all I want to do is abandon my have-tos in favour of curling up in a cosy corner with some treats.
And those, dear Reader, are these:

Resting
Reading
Writing
Arting
Being

This week a lovely friend gave me a copy of Wintering by Katherine May, summed up by Raynor Winn in her back-cover blurb as ‘A beautiful, gentle exploration of the dark season of life and the light of spring that eventually follows.’

If you read only one thing this season, by golly, make it this:

Below is a new version of a post I’d first published last autumn. If you’re seeing it for the first time, thank you so much for being here, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. If you recognise it, thank you for reading this new edit!

Sending love in this restive season,

Rebecca

No passion for plants, but their names are beautiful

Every autumn, before the Liquidambar styraciflua1 that dominates our front garden has even begun to paint new purple edges and speckles on its leaves, the Parthenocissus quinquefolia2 sprawling across the front wall of our house turns a pale yellow, then pink. Soon it’s a blazing red, and suddenly the wall is naked as the leaflets making up the creeper’s compound leaves flutter singly to the ground to make a scarlet drift.

Virginia creeper - Parthenocissus quinquefolia - by Rebecca.

I’m the odd one out in a family of horticulturists: my fingers are grubby, not green.

Houseplants die under my care. In my raised bed vegetable plants shrivel and die, bolt and die, get mildew and die, or just die. I wish it weren’t so, but I am not a natural nurturer. Let’s just be grateful that I don’t have any children.

I love being out in nature. I love the beauty of plants. I enjoy looking at them, touching them, breathing in the scent of their flowers and feeling the texture of their leaves. I enjoy eating them, too.

It’s a shame that the gift of growing them has passed me by.

The scale of my horticultural ineptitude, though, is at least equalled by the size of my passion for language, and I love the sound and feel of plants’ Latin names as I say them out loud.

I gather an early word in my vocabulary back when I was still ‘talking scribble’ (a term coined by my dad for my childish babbling) was ‘mesembryanthemum’.

Try saying that out loud. Mesembryanthemum.

muh-zem-bree-YANTH-uh-mum

So what had got me thinking about this? Out on my first local walk for what had seemed like weeks, I got lost on a route that I was sure I’d known like the back of my hand the last time I’d been on it. The path was suddenly unfamiliar, its edges blurred by autumn leaf fall.

Photographs and mixed media artwork by Rebecca.

Seeking comfort and reassurance from a known way I took a footpath route which runs through a beautiful private garden. It had been a while since I’d seen it, before even the first tinge of gold had hit the bracken.

And there in the late morning October sunshine I found that my favourite tree in the world – not for its appearance but for its name – had become a stunning, burnished copper.

Metasequoia glyptostroboides3

METTUH-sih-KOY-uh GLIP-toe-struh-BOY-deez

Dawn redwood – Metasequoia glyptostroboides – photographed by Rebecca in October 2022.

My parents have a passion for plants, gardens and gardening: their own garden is not something I can quite find words good enough to describe. Trust me, it’s beautiful.

Their parents, too, loved gardening. Grandpa’s greenhouse was his life’s work: in it, on a steep fellside in the cool northwest of England, he grew nectarines, two varieties of peaches and lustrous blacker-than-black grapes with a gorgeous fuzzy-looking coat of blue-grey bloom. I remember rubbing the bloom off a grape with my child-size thumb and being awed by the smooth, shiny black jewel beneath. Grandpa would use a rabbit’s paw to pollinate the peaches, which I would find fascinating. I never found out where he’d acquired the paw: I didn’t dare ask.

Grandma – no fan of the rabbit’s paw, and with a firm preference for Grandpa to pollinate with a paintbrush – would give us a tour of the garden on every visit. The switchbacks of lawn that snaked their way down the slope towards the lake would be lined with snowdrops, grape hyacinths or pinks, depending on the season, and her ancient acer was a source of particular pride. There were other trees, too. ‘That’s the oak that grew from the acorn you’d brought back from Brock Hole!’ she would tell me every year. I wonder how tall that tree is now, or even if it’s still there?

On Dad’s side of the family Granny’s garden was more utilitarian, with priority given to vegetables. She took care of all the natural life that stalked her crops, happily sharing her prolific brassicas with a large population of cabbage white butterflies. Mum still tells a good story about the first meal that Granny had ever cooked for her. ‘Cauliflower cheese, complete with caterpillars. I couldn’t eat it.’

Long pause.

‘But DADDY did!’

Poor Dad. I’m not surprised, though. He doesn’t seem to mind finding a slug in his homegrown salad either, although I’ve never seen him actually eat one.

Jars of delicious jams, jellies, chutneys and pickles would find their way from Granny’s larder to ours in varying quantities according to the size of the season’s yield. She was particularly keen on mint jelly for serving with lamb, and she’d make pounds and pounds of it. Raising sheep on our own smallholding we’d eat a lot of lamb, so mint jelly was always welcome.

Granny would chop the mint finely and boil it up with the endless supply of wonky cooking apples from the trees at the top of her garden to make a clear, deep rose-coloured jelly.

One Sunday lunchtime a new jar was brought out to the table, displaying a perfect earwig in the very centre: jellied forever in suspended animation.

Jan Gillbank for the English for the Australian Curriculum website, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In binomial nomenclature, the Greek suffix -oides is adopted to show that the plant resembles something.

On a walk with Mum around a botanical garden one day we had stopped to admire an Indian bean tree – Catalpa bignonioides4 – in its summer glory; it had huge leaves and upright panicles of large, white flowers.

‘What are nonnies?’ I asked Mum.

She was puzzled. ‘Nonnies?’

‘Yes, nonnies. The label says this tree’s got big ones!’

Imagine my delight on another visit later in the year when the bean tree had come through with the promise on its label. Huge numbers of long, slender ‘beans’ were now dripping from its branches.

‘There you are!’ I announced. ‘Big nonnies!’ 🤣

As for my own garden, it contains trees and anonymous shrubs, and a lawn whose shape I can’t describe other than to say that cutting the grass is more of a challenge than I’d like. It is to Mother Nature’s credit that our little patch of land thrives in spite of my hapless attentions.

I’ll never be a horticulturist. The apples which I neglect to thin once fruit has set on our tree will not be jellied to anoint roast lamb or to preserve earwigs, nor am I likely to ever prune my hydrangea at quite the right time. But there are things I can do. I can watch for that first snowdrop in the new year, and sow runner beans in spring so that I can enjoy their later harvest. In summer I can cut the grass and try not to mind too much that the lawn is such a crazy shape, and at this time of year I’m more likely to kick my way through fallen leaves like a child instead of raking them up for the compost bin.

Reader, I don’t need to be an expert in plants to find them beautiful. And on my next walk in the autumn sunshine I’ll take time to bathe in the copper glow of the Metasequoia glyptostroboides as I repeat out loud its beautiful name.

Love,

Rebecca

Dear Reader, I'm lost

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