The Berry Fair - Midsummer Notes from The Hill of the Poets

The Berry Fair was a festival in bygone days where I used to live, although it had gone by the time I moved there. There are some sources that suggest there used to be berry fairs in the Orchard Quarter of Lanarkshire too, but there is no sign of anything similar now.

There are berries, though - strawberries in single figures in my garden, in abundance in the wastelands at the edges of hedgerows and woodland, and gooseberries on my bush. We have had gooseberry fool twice already this summer, and there are enough berries for at least twice more, which makes someone in this house very happy. Cherries are ripening on the trees on Main Street, blackcurrants will be ripe in a week or two, and I’m planning an excursion to pick some wild raspberries, if the birds will leave me any.
The ephemerality of berries used to be a common metaphor for mortality ‘Life is but a Cherry Fair/All things must pass and so must I algate’ as the medieval poet said. Me too – here’s a poem from The Territory of Rain, full of the rush and passion of it all, so quick to burn out, grab it while you can.
Summering
Summer is moving on.
The train cuts through summer verges
of foxglove, rose and elderflower.
Moon-daisies burn like bonfires.
Yellow spikes of broom spill
scent of butterscotch and coconut.

Summer is loud and flirty,
all trills and cascades of birdsong
and exhibitionist butterflies
twinkling over the cuckoo flower.
Lapwings jazz-dance, and skylarks
climb the sky, lost in the sundazzle.
Swifts careen round the chimneys,
playing kiss-chase on edgy black wings.

Summer is changing weathers,
rain and wind make kaleidoscopes
of cloud and rainbows scattered
across the face of the hill.
New wheat and barley shake green
and silver ripples over the fields.
Bird, flower, insect, leaf, grass,
rise and fall and multiply, hatch
faster than beak or tooth can eat.

Summer is always hungry
moving out to catch the crop,
the mayfly hatch, the caterpillars
feasting on the new leaves,
unguarded nests, still ponds,
the nectar trail from orchard to lime walk,
from clover to heathery slopes,
cream, honey, berries, new eggs, love.

The birds have mostly scattered by now, though the bird feeder was wearing a heavy necklace of the starlings Class of 25 this morning. House martins are nesting on the old Library building down the hill, and there was a cloud of swifts over the garden on one of the very hot days last week, but most of the time we are seeing the crows and the magpies, the pigeons and the gulls which are always the last to nest. The flowers are phenomenal this year – the dry weather didn’t do much for the early crops, but the hedgerows are bursting now with moon daisies and red campion, knapweeds, buttercups and vetches. I was walking up the hill from the bus and counting all the flower species I saw, and there were about fifty. The best were the common spotted orchids I saw on a bank too steep for much mowing that runs down to a main road. I can’t believe the contractor in charge of our estate, who is wedded to the strimmer and the sprayer, said quite seriously that he had to do it because land round here is no good for wildflowers!
The garden isn’t too bad either just now. We’ve had the Welsh poppies, the lily of the valley and the irises for a while, and roses, lavender, hyssop and opium poppies are just starting in the front of the house, which faces east. And the first meadowsweet! In the back garden the thyme is over, but the lower roundel garden is full of bees on the cranesbills and catnip, and the vervain, mugwort and alchemilla have flower buds. They aren’t going to be as colourful as what’s in the front, but they have their own rather spooky gothic charm.

I am taking my harvests as they come, roses for pot pourri, lemon thyme for the kitchen, elderflower for three herb tea, a gift from the wood. I’m making jam again, and chive flower vinegar, and clearing space in the freezer for storing the summer as it flies by.
I’ve almost finished the poetry collection now, with only two more poems to go (so long as I don’t get sidetracked by marshy edgeland poems which somehow seem to fit the theme). You can see some of the new work in the Solstice Issue of Littoral Magazine, and later there will be some Nine Herbs poems in Mugwort. I have revived my blog, at https://burnedthumb.com/ where you will find some reviews, and some thoughts about language and haunted landscapes and so on. It’s still on wordpress for now, but my web dev daughter is planning a light touch AI free substitute which will be ready later in the summer. Which is a reminder that when that goes live, the old burnedthumb will be deleted, so if there’s a review or an article or there was something about herbs you wanted to copy, grab it now.
Reading will have to take a back seat for a while, but there are two books I really want to recommend – first, The Land in Our Bones by Layla K Feghali, which is about the history of Middle Eastern herbalism, but also about culture and connection to the land, and, crucially, how these can be maintained and restored in a time of exile and displacement. The second is poetry - Passion by David Morley. I started it only this morning, and the poems about birds are stunning. The poems about Romany language and life are very powerful too, but I’ll get back to them later, probably on the blog. Meantime, enjoy your summer – catch all the sun and all the crops - cream, honey, berries, new eggs, love!