Week 33

Travellers joy and autumn hawkbit

Hello!

I hope you’ve had a lovely lazy summery week. Before we begin I want to say a huge THANK YOU to those of you who contributed your thoughts about As The Season Turns, my podcast with Ffern. We really didn’t expect quite such an outpouring of love and it is wonderful to really understand what the podcast means to so many of you. So many great ideas too. We will now feed them all into our supercomputer/have a big leisurely lunch and come up with some plans. Delightfully a couple of you hadn’t heard of it until that moment which reminds me that I MUST remember to post it here. I will. I also said that we would pick one commenter at random to win a bottle of Ffern’s Summer 24 fragrance and my daughter has just pulled a scrap of paper from a pink cowboy hat which says that the winner is Donna Cuthbert! Congratulations Donna, and I will be in touch to arrange delivery of your beautiful perfume.

Now, to business. This is our weekly community post in which I write about something about this week that feels particularly ‘this week in the year’ and then you respond in the comments with yours. It might be something you’ve spotted but can equally be an activity, a flavour, a sound, even a waft of scent. It doesn’t have to be wholesome and nature based either: visiting the funfair or spotting something seasonal in the supermarket is just as good. At the end of the month I stitch them all together into one big poem of the month and it is just kind of magic. And we like magic here.

Here’s mine:

Traveller’s joy

I have noticed this on two separate walks this week having not noticed it earlier so I guess it is just into flower, scrambling up scrubby woodland edge shrubs. This is our native clematis and I particularly love it as its common name changes with the time of year, which is of course right up my street. It is ‘traveller’s joy’ now, but becomes ‘old man’s beard’ in autumn and winter, when the fluff of seedheads appears.

And here’s a bonus pic. I was trying to take a picture of this autumn hawkbit, which has just come into flower on the common, and the dogs noticed I was squatting down near the ground and thought that just looked like the most fun thing in the world ever and raced back up the hill. So I kept snapping, so you get autumn hawkbit AND Korina and Saffy (left to right).

That’s it from me! Please leave your comments below. What have you done/eaten/baked/bought in the supermarket/spotted in the woodland that felt particularly ‘this week’?