Forest bathing

According to an article in the Canadian Globe and Mail, ‘people around the world have an intuitive sense of the restorative power of natural environments.’*  I count my family and myself extremely fortunate, then, that we live surrounded by woods and fields, where our daily walks are a balm to the soul. From the same article, I learn that the Japanese have a delicious phrase for this: shinrin-yoku or ‘forest bathing’.

I have been doing a good deal of forest bathing recently. My favourite place to bathe at the moment is in the woods beside the river. There, the green scent of the trees and the perfume of bluebells and lily-of-the-valley growing wild on each side of the path mingle with the river’s own cool smell, and the sound of the breeze whispering in the leaves plays alongside the bubble and swish of the water. It is a most soothing sensory experience.

My camera has not been working for the past three weeks. As is turns out, I have not much felt like taking photos recently, so I have not missed it as much as you might think; despite the fact that this past week has been gloriously hot and sunny, and that this May in general has been one of the most poignantly beautiful that I can remember. I do hope that the new camera which I have (at long last) ordered arrives soon though. What use is a nature blogger without a camera?

Meanwhile, I can at least show you this river-side path as it was a month ago. Then, there were daffodils in bloom and new leaves emerging. It was a beautiful spot in April too – but May is my favourite month of all for forest bathing.

*Thanks to Rachel Hazell for drawing my attention to the article.

no words

Grief is a strange state. And it is a state of being, not a mere mood. At any moment, one is both totally immersed in it and strangely detached, observing, describing, comparing. In this state, staring mortality in the face, one becomes profoundly serious. Most of the time – in other states – we cross the street to avoid the contemplation of mortality. Perhaps we have to: otherwise, there would be no joy, no levity and silliness in life, and a little frivolity is essential to our well-being.

The death of someone we love, however, is the least frivolous event we will ever face. It commands seriousness. It encompasses everything we have been and will be. It starts a reel of memories running through one’s head and fills one’s inner ear with the voice of the person who has died. It is strangely exhausting. It touches everyone who knew that person, so that one is acutely conscious of and concerned for the grief of others, while in the middle of one’s own.

So when a kind acquaintance stops you in the street and asks how you’re doing, there is so much to tell that there is nothing to say. How do you summarise this state of being, this strange world of grief?

forget-me-nots in the garden

This post refers to the previous one, Beeches, in memoriam.

Beeches, in memoriam

My father-in-law was a great tree planter. When we first moved here to take over the running of the estate from him, we used to joke that he, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum: wherever there was a space, he had stuck in another tree. Many of the saplings he planted are now reaching maturity, such as the avenue of beeches which he planted to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. (It’s quite a thought that we are now in the position of being able to plant trees for the Diamond Jubilee this year.)

The Silver Jubliee Terrace of beeches in their autumn colours.

It is ancient conifers which predominate, however, in the policies (grounds) of this castle. These overgrown Christmas trees can be hard to tell apart and, as a young bride, I was keen to learn. My father-in-law was not the easiest teacher. When asked to identify a tree, he would inevitably give the botanically correct Latin binomial, rather than the name by which most people knew it.

‘What’s this one?’ I’d ask.

‘Well, that’s a Picea sitchensis, obviously,’ he’d reply, leaving me none the wiser. (It’s a Sitka spruce, I now know. At least, I think I do.)

Of all the trees he taught me, my favourite mouthful of arborial syllables has to be Metasequoia glyptostroboides. But it has taken years of patient reminders from my husband for me to learn that this name refers to those nice pointy Dawn redwoods beside the drive. My father-in-law’s knowledge of his beloved trees was immense, and we are enjoying following in his footsteps, scampering to catch up.

Conifers notwithstanding, it was beeches that were his favourite trees. Oak is the symbol of our clan and we have many fine old oak trees here, but you can’t beat the beauty of a beechwood. At this time of year, the fresh green of the young beech leaves filters sunlight through to the bluebells lapping at the feet of the smooth grey tree trunks. In the autumn, the beechwoods bring a blaze of red-gold to the darkening landscape. Beech have become my favourite trees too, and I am so grateful to my father-in-law for the trees that he has planted which we and our children now enjoy.

My father-in-law died peacefully last weekend. In the middle of the family’s ups and downs of grief, and all the business of arranging his funeral here in our family chapel this weekend, what a blessing it is to be able to walk in the woods every day, and to remember him with gratitude and love.

The Tuesday tree: ahh, crab-apple blossom time!

What could be more perfectly beautiful than pink and white apple blossom against a blue spring sky? Add the bright green grass and some white narcissi under the apple tree, and you have my perfect spring picture. (Well, putting a lamb or a baby rabbit in the frame might top it, though perhaps that would be veering into kitsch.) In the dreich days of early spring, I long and long for the day when the crab-apple  tree will bloom, the prettiest blossom of the year. And lo, that day is arrived.

It is late afternoon, warm in the sun though chilly in the shade. The sunshine slants through the leaves and blossom.

Blue tits and chaffinches are chirruping and twittering in the old yews. From a sycamore beyond the garden wall comes the bubbling song of a blackbird. The faint scent of the crab apple blossom is crisp and sweet: it smells as perfect as it looks.

No wonder I look forward to this all year.

You might like another post on apple blossom: Seeing this, who could blame Eve?

Cycling in the ballroom: children’s castle memories

Easter is usually when our calendar of events starts to fill up here at Castle Beastie. True to form, we have been so busy since coming back from Malta that I’ve been too busy doing to blog about it. At last, though, a quiet moment.

Our first guided tour of the season took place a couple of weeks ago. While we are not generally open to the public, we do undertake tours for private parties by arrangement. This first tour (there have been others since) was unusual in that it was a group of local people, several of whom we knew. The historic church in our nearest town had held a raffle to raise funds, and the prize of a tour of our castle and grounds was won by the organist. Since he is also the choir master, he invited the church choir to join him.

As usual, my husband was master of ceremonies while I ‘did’ behind the scenes. So it was not until the end of the tour that I was able to meet up with the party, when we all sat down for a cup of tea in the dining room. We always feel that we learn something from every group that comes round – there is always somebody who can make an informed suggestion on gardening, architecture, painting or what-have-you – but this party was particularly interesting as several of them were born and brought up in the immediate area. They were able to share memories of my husband’s grandparent’s generation, forbears who died when we were young or before we were even born.

One of the party, Ian, a retired stonemason, reminisced about his childhood in the area when his best friend was the son of one of the estate’s employees. Gesturing out of the dining room window at the peaceful parkland, he told me how he remembered it as it was during the Second World War, when the parkland was covered in Nissen huts to house troops. The castle itself was requisitioned as a billet for officers, while its inhabitants – then only my husband’s bachelor great-uncle and his unmarried sister – retreated to a couple of rooms at one end of the house, doing their best for the war effort but otherwise keeping out of the way.

After the war, the the castle was once again almost deserted. Ian still used to cycle down from the village to play with his friend on the estate, but there was no longer the excitement of watching the comings and goings of the soldiers. So perhaps it was as a small compensation that, on wet days, the friend’s father sometimes let them take their bikes into the empty rooms of the castle and cycle around the ballroom! I’m not sure that anyone in our family was aware of this at the time, mind you, so if it hadn’t been for the organist winning a guided tour, we might never have heard this delightful memory.

The funny thing is that, while the ballroom is out of bounds to bicycles these days (we need to keep it presentable for tours, after all), in-house cycling is still part of family life. Just as their father did before them, on days when it is too wet or snowy to cycle outside, our sons roar up and down the basement corridors on a ramshackle collection of ancient bikes and tricycles. No doubt they’ll remember that just as happily as one small boy remembered cycling round the ballroom, just after the war.

You might enjoy another experience of castle childhood in Here be treasure.

The Tuesday tree: May greenness

Happy May Day! This is a day which, despite being hijacked by the Reds in the twentieth century, is always associated in my mind with the colour green. Ahh, isn’t May a beautiful month in Britain? April, however pretty, is still fraught with the possibility of frosts and even brief snowfalls (and indeed we have had both this April). In May, however, you can feel the earth exhaling, relaxing into the promise of summer. A slow green smile spreads over the face of the countryside. There is blossom on the fruit trees, there are flowers in gardens, and even the most hesitant of trees (the ash is usually last, and the beech and sweet chestnut have been slow this year too) are flowering or unfurling their first translucent green leaves.

Yesterday I took the dogs through the woods at around six o’clock in the evening. It’s a lovely time to be outside. The landscape is softened by the hazy light of evening, and birdsong fills the woods.

A green oak throws its evening shadow across the grass; at the left of the picture you can see our ancient gean still blossoming

At the weekend my husband and son repaired the woodland path which had been destroyed by the clear-up operation after the winter storms. They have done a lovely job, so the dogs and I follow their trail of stones into the heart of the wood, past the green horse chestnut.

Overhead, the fulness of the horse chestnut contrasts with the first tentative sprays of green on the silhouettes of the beech. To me, there is no green so exquisite as the green of spring beech leaves: they are later than last year, so I have all that to look forward to.

By contrast, the new growth on the oaks looks quite a rusty, golden green.

And the new oak leaves look more like little frills than the misty spray of the beech leaves.

This May, I wish you every shade of sweet, refreshing, spring green.

You might enjoy: Beech woods in springtime and The Trees, a poem by Philip Larkin.

The Tuesday tree: green sycamore

In this strangely precocious spring, it is the sycamores that have galloped ahead of the other trees (can a tree gallop?) in putting out their leaves. While the limes and oaks have a light green mist over their branches and the beeches are still deciding whether to start, the sycamores look as if it’s June already. These photos were taken on the last day of March.

This particular tree is a wonderful mature specimen. It has had plenty of room to grow out as well as up. Like many such sycamores, it has a pleasing shape with a substantial presence.

This sycamore shares a field with a standing stone, as you can see in the photo below. We don’t know how many centuries the stone has stood there: sometimes I wonder about the changes it has witnessed to the landscape, as the seasons swirl around it like water around a rock in a river. (Once some archaeologists came to excavate the soil around the stone. They were very excited to find the skull of a horse. Evidence of a pagan Celtic cult? No, some estate workers had buried it there for a little joke at the expense of the learned archaeologists!) If stones could talk…

I think that my favourite aspect of a mature tree like this sycamore is the generous green space it creates under its spreading boughs. By the end of March, this one was so far advanced that already you could find that wonderful dappled light on its trunk, and an inviting shade in which to sit for a while on a sunny spring day.

You might enjoy Four seasons of a sycamore. There are more photos of the standing stone in Winter solstice and in First snow.