Week 19
Jack in the Green and a BOOK giveaway!
Hello! It is the best week of the best month in the year and I am feeling very in love with everything - the greens! the fluffy hedgerows! The bluebells and dandelions! The SWIFTS! Everything is earthy and green and pagan feeling at this moment in the year and I feel full of it.
This is our weekly community post in which we share the minutiae that we notice as the seasons change - I tell you mine and then you tell me yours - and at the end of each month I weave them into a poem of the month, like April’s, here.
In addition today we have some new book news and a competition, so please do read on to the end.
First though…here’s my seasonal thing:
Jack-in-the-Green
I love Jack in the Green! Jack and his attendants process through the streets of Bristol on the first Saturday of May, ending up on the common right by my house and there they perform the poem The Green Man by William Anderson, do some Morris dancing, and then slay Jack to release the spirit of summer, or something… At which moment the local children and a good few of us adults pile in and pull Jack apart for the prize of a bit of greenery to give us luck all year. I got mine.
Here’s some Morris dancing in the rain, how terribly English.
It rained and rained unfortunately but these troopers pushed on through and summer is now here.
Now some book news…I have TWO new books out this week and so it seems like a good moment for a competition. The first is the latest in my ‘A Year in’ series - ‘A Year in Nature’ - and it takes extracts from across all of my almanacs and makes up a year of beehives, hedgerows, gardens, ponds and all the rest. It is a beauty and you can find it in the link below:
And the second is The Twilight Gardener, a reissue of an old book of mine with a gorgeous new design and lots of new content. It shows you how to make the most of your garden during the dusk hours, with night-wildlife-friendly planting and evening-scented plants as well as lots of design ideas.
You can find it in the same link above but I am also going to run a competition this week: one commenter will win a bundle of all of the ‘A Year in’ books and another will win a copy of ‘The Twilight Gardener’ - happy to send them wherever so please do comment away and I will pick at random.
That’s it from me, now over to you - what have you seen/heard/eaten etc… this week that felt particular to this very month in the year? Answers below.
I have a small urban garden which is kept as natural as possible and I’ve always wanted a night garden full of flowers that really come to life in the moonlight, both visually and fragrantly. I love this time of the year when I can see my seedlings starting to reach up to the skies and there’s the promise of summer (hopefully with some sun!), ahead 🌱
Green green green in a thousand shades - and the fresh scented air of Spring in every breath. Just wish it would warm up in these northern hills a little! This week is all about sieving compost, planting veg seedlings and enjoying hours in the garden, swallows swooping overhead. The May blossom in full throttle everywhere. I love the colour palette in the garden just now!