Week 28

Showing off my garden; massive cherries; wasteland honeyed pineapple

Hello! I hope you’ve had a good week. It’s been hot and wet by turns here, and one of those weeks where you set off in a t-shirt and end up in a torrential downpour, as I did yesterday morning… I hope you have managed to dodge the rain.

This is my weekly post where I talk about three things I have noticed/eaten/done/ sniffed this week but kick off with a kind of prose poem of your comments of last week, just because I love them. But before I do the usual thing I want to draw your attention to this gorgeous comment from regular commenter Ella Bragonier of The Lanceybrook Year substack. She wrote that one of her ‘seasonal things’ was…

‘…discovering wild strawberries in Devon - it made me think of the Swedish word smultronställe, which literally means a place where wild strawberries grow but can also mean any secretish place where life feels like an epiphany (the cool interior of a church on a hot day, the place high up in an old tree where you can see the world, a moment in an art gallery where it is just you and the paintings). And then I was in Ashton court, with a quiet view of Bristol, framed by golden wild grasses rushing gently in the breeze, spreading beneath the pooling darkness of huge green oaks and linden trees with their honey, lemon scented blossom. Another kind of smultronställe. July feels full of those.’

Isn’t that just a beautiful thing? What a word, and the most gorgeous description of it. And yes, very ‘July’ actually, those moments of peaceful communing with ourselves after the frenzy of midsummer, a part of that ‘settling in’ to summer that a few of us mentioned last week. I thought you might all want it in your heads too. I will be looking out for my own smultronställes and I hope you will too.

Here’s the rest of your Week 27s, the theme of which was…blackcurrants, stone fruit and storms:

Watching Wimbledon on the telly with an accompanying thunderstorm outside; seeing the bee hotels fill up with mud and circles of green leaves; ice creams after school pick up; lavender and sweet peas; the ripening crops in the fields and the darker colour of the trees; being caught in a heavy downpour and then too hot in the sun 'on repeat'; the scent of blackcurrant leaves while harvesting the fruit, then making jam; celebrating the July 4th holiday with hamburgers and fireworks; billowing stormscapes over the sea, with bright sun breaking through dark grey and purple clouds; popping into the community garden for little snacks of strawberries and currants; relishing having the window open and listening to those summer storms; the background hum of the municipal lawnmower; great days for line dried laundry; walking in the city where trees offer deep shade and dappled light; filming the osprey chicks being ringed; out in the raspberry patch every evening, bowls in hand; the smell of suntan lotion and salt encrusted skin; slices of super moon peeking through thick heavy storm clouds; freezing basil and rocket pesto; fallen mirabelles, and young hazelnuts and blackberries; ripe apricots poached with lemon juice so they are as tart and sweet as oranges.

Absolutely magical. These comments always astound me when they are all put together like that. They make such a rounded and odd and interesting insight into the particularities of the moment. Thank you.

And now here’s my Week 28

Showing off my garden

The garden now

This is not a moment as such but I just realised that I want to show off my garden, or at least a little corner of it, for the first time in a long time. It started the year in a real state, as you’ll see below. All of the box hedging had died, my big, beautiful jasmine had been severely hit by frost and was on its last legs, and the bit nearest the house was full of junk from clearing out a room to be redecorated. I really despaired. It’s still not amazing, there is a long way to go, but I’ve been working really hard on it and this week got out the very last of those box plants and put in the first of the Jo-Thompson inspired plants. None of that will come to anything for a little while but and I feel like I can give you a glimpse now.

My shame. The garden at the beginning of the year

Massive cherries

Check out these cherries! Vast! This is our reward for going to the greengrocers instead of the supermarket for our veg, she says smugly…

Wasteland honeyed pineapple

This is wild chamomile, or pineapple weed, a plant of wasteland, and it is a plant for which I have a very specific photograph in my mind from the first time I encountered it. I was about aged 7 or 8, on the rec behind our house on a summer evening, chasing or being chased, all scuffed knees and sunburn and rara skirts. I spotted this on the edge of a little path that snaked around an old rusted bedstead that someone had dumped there long enough for paths to form around it from local kids’ feet. Perhaps a little of the perfume of it drifted up to me because I picked a bit and held it to my nose and sniffed, and found it such an odd and unexpected scent - honey and dust, pineapple and summer - that the moment lodged in my mind. I saw some this week along a path where I was walking the dogs and I picked it up and sniffed it, as I always do when I see it, and I was right there.

That’s it from me. Let me know what you have spotted/done/eaten or sniffed this week that has felt particularly ‘this week’