The Reckoning and the Reset - Autumn on The Hill of the Poets

The year is tipping into the new season. The air is colder and the trees are shaking in the south-westerly winds. It is sunny today, the sort of lively weather I like, that makes you feel glad to be alive and ready to be out in it. There is a robin letting everything know whose garden this is, and the chaffinches and long-tailed tits are taking advantage of the gap between two waves of starlings to come in and raid the bird feeder.The housemartins left last week in a swirl of rain, and the cats are prowling, hoping that new arrivals won’t be so cautious as the ones who know them well. The garden is looking tired, apart from the marigolds, and a second flush of Buff Beauty roses.

The harvest is in, and there are celebrations - apple cakes and bramble jelly and new woolly jumpers on Instagram. But it’s also a time of reckoning. What was successful? How ready are we for winter? What needs doing to see us through the cold dark and bad weather? Thoughts are turning towards end days, or new starts in schools and universities, and how are we all going to cope?

My own tomatoes did very poorly, and you can count how many I got on your fingers, so they are coming out of the greenhouse and the half-hardy herbs - lemon verbena, scented-leaf pelargoniums, French tarragon and Greek oregano - can go in. Some people have claimed that this has been a mast year for trees, but it seems very uneven here. Hawthorn and rowan trees have done well, but the lime trees didn’t seem to, and there are no beech nuts or sycamore wings at all. On the other hand, oaks and hazel have more nuts than I’ve ever seen. On a garden note, however, we had our first damson harvest, and I’ve been able to make jelly and damson cheese for the first time since the pandemic. The apples are ripening on the tree, but won’t be ready for a few weeks yet, but the blackberry harvest was early and we went picking during the hot weather. The season was good for butterflies, and we saw speckled wood and painted ladies as well as the usual red admirals, peacocks and tortoiseshells while we were there. The garden was favoured too - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a speckled wood here before, and this was a relief after the spectacularly poor year last year.

So what to do next? It’s time to chop and drop the spent foliage, and think about bulbs. I’m still trying to improve the structure of our soil to drain better in winter, and retain more moisture in summer, and to provide some flowers for early pollinators, so that bumble bees coming out of hibernation in the sheltered sunny parts of the garden can forage.The magical garden is getting a makeover - the mugwort, which overpowered everything else, will be moved to a corner, and I will add something colourful, like California poppies, and give the verbena, marshmallow and alchemilla room to breathe. I recently read about creating a rock pile to provide habitat for invertebrates, and as I’m still digging up stones and builders’ rubble out of the beds, that looks like a very good idea.
The reckoning on the writing front is a little better. The book is almost finished, and the spruced up website and blog are now live. The blog is still at www.burnedthumb.com, and it is hosted by the open-source Bludit, so no AI or privacy issues. The Wordpress blog has now been deleted, but I archived a lot of work, so if there was a post about herbs, a review or a particularly memorable rant you want to refer to, I probably have a copy somewhere. You will find the new site loads a LOT faster now there is not twenty years of blogging to cover!
I have had work published in the excellent Mugwort Magazine lately, and I believe there may be a poem on the Winged Moon Substack at some point.
I intend to read some Dungavel poems, and perhaps something new in support of refugees at a rally in Glasgow in October - there will be more details as I get them.
And in the new year I will once again be one of the judges for the William Bonar Poetry Competition, which is launched this year on National Poetry Day. I will post all the details on both my website and the blog, so if you are eligible to enter, please stand by for more information.
I have been away from home three times since the last newsletter, which is very unusual for me, and my reading has been scrappy and varied. I will heartily recommend Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, and the poetry of Eliza O’Toole which was short-listed for the Laurel Prize, but though I hope to review these books, and others, on the blog it will have to wait until the very last poem, which doesn’t seem to want to get past the second stanza, is finally finished!

May your harvests, of whatever kind, be bountiful!