Here’s a photograph taken from my bedroom window this morning. A few weeks ago, someone (I thought Sig, but I can’t find it) mentioned how difficult it was to imagine a green, living landscape emerging from the muddy browns and greys that the melting snow was revealing. I couldn’t agree more, but here it is once again. In a couple of weeks time that row of twelve skeletal ash that follows a small stream down the hill will come into leaf. Then it will divide this view, screening off the emerald-green profile of the hillside, but I won’t care because the trees themselves are so pretty. Ash trees are the last to get leaves and the first to lose them, growing like mad in the meantime.
A Bad Guide 
Jeg sier, Artur. Hva kan være seccret av denne vidunderlige renessanse?
Hormon injeksjoner, kanskje?
(Men sikkert ikke!)
Tom, You are so welcome back! I’ve been thinking of you today (I glimpsed the name Keats on a bookshelf), and lo, you turn up snakkering norsk! As far as I know sikkert ikke, no one’s injecting artificial stuff into that hillside yet, thank God. Rain is clearly the secret – well, if not the secret, then the magic ingredient (and it’s clear if you’ve been standing in it nearly every day for the past few weeks, as I have).
Just one green word: ENVY!
Hahaha.
It’s such a marvel and a wonder to see you and your living landscape thriving and I should also say flourishing not to mention being brilliantly naturally green again, Artur.
Nothing else like it, and we shall accept no substitutes, either.
Tom, that’s a great post you’ve got on The Little Prince. I’ve linked to it on facebook, on my facebook page, but you ought to put yourself up on facebook and link to them every day. (It’s the way of the future, the new black etc.)
I wouldn’t describe Seurat’s pointillisme as “foggy”, but it can make things flat though, to some extent.
I believe earlier this month you received an invitation for a paintings exhibition. Did you go?
Oh, no, it’s not that the Seurat was in any way foggy, I just meant it was a piece of land without any scale – like that island, a bit.
I can’t remember the invitation. Was it in Norway? I’m pretty sure I didn’t go.
Think I know the feeling, Artur. Can’t recall going, nor not going. But as I was not invited and it was the wrong continent and I don’t get out much any more (that tiresome business of having been run over by a car remains a bother), there are at least those useful clues suggesting the answer would be probably not. (Also helpful that Sig hasn’t asked me.)
Delighted to hear you liked the Little Prince post. The extremely talented person who did the “textured photo” at the top (as well as four more of those, below) is greatly enamoured of that book, and reads it as a kind of poetic parable. (She’s a neuroscientist in Japan, but comes from Alsace, and I think her infatuation with LPP dates back to her childhood.)
I am very shyly pushing open the door to the side streets on this great pages of yours, A.J.P. Crown, just popping in to say that it has been an honor to be part of the Little Prince post on Beyond the Pale and to read all the comments it has generated. A wonderful present that can be infinitely enjoyed. Thank you so much…
Don’t be shy. We never feel we’ve generated enough rambling comments before they hit three figures, but they don’t all show up the same day as the post. Tom’s posts are one of the best things on the web. I think the photographs and poetry probably only work so well together because a) the quality of both is so high and b) Tom can find them consistently.
Having kind things said by such brilliant colleagues of the occasionally green and sometimes even pleasant land of the Aether as Marie and Artur might turn one’s head were it not already spinning about like that of the unfortunate Exorcism subject in the film of yesteryear. (The condition must be chronic.)
One may now pass out of this world knowing one’s last hours were spent among geniuses.
Almost said celebrities.
But in view of the notoriously jealous vicissitudes of history I wouldn’t want to draw too much attention upon my talented friends, for fear the attention might draw the falling of the Blade.
It is to be hoped others will be tempted to inspect Marie’s great work in such places as
this, and this, and this (the image on top).
A few weeks ago, someone (I thought Sig, but I can’t find it) mentioned how difficult it was to imagine a green, living landscape emerging from the muddy browns and greys that the melting snow was revealing.
Yes, but it looks as if the comment has disappeared. It was supposed to be there:
But it’s not there anymore. It probably melted away.
I also see above a comment dated 16 May 2013 at 3:34 am that was not posted in this note. (Unless I made a mistake back then?)
Hello, sorry for my long absence, I did not mean to miss so much but when the format here was changed I found it hard to find my way around it. I am very glad to see Tom Clark and Marie W here as I read their Petit Prince (on Artur’s recommendation) a couple of days ago. Congratulations/félicitations to both!
Here too we now have little leaves on most of the trees (no ash trees in the city though), I have tulips in front of my house and the backyard is getting bluer every day with forget-me-nots among the grass. No mowing until the forget-me-nots are gone.
Sig, I’ll take a look in the archived material when I get back from London.
I’m very glad to see your comment too, m-l. Here in London there are so many plants and trees with blossom. Yesterday I saw three fields of pasture (for the cows, by the River), buttercups mixed with daisies in places & with borage around the edges, may blossom & cow parsley. Ok, Richmond, not really central London, but it’s like going back in time by a couple of centuries. Lists of plant name are boring, though. Sorry. Not like the real thing.
We sallied forth this a.m. and saw two pastures that were just seas of cow parsley – a brief beauty but very striking. And the wisteria is as lovely as I’ve seen.
Yes, wisteria is everywhere. Every other house seems to be covered by wisteria. I’m wondering why it’s all just one colour, though. Why no white or darker blues?
No, lists of plant names are rarely boring, even when one doesn’t know all the plants. Plants tend to have lovely names, and when not lovely at least amusing.
Amazing that there are so many flowers out already. What is “cow parsley”? Could it be “Queen Anne’s lace”? (a kind of wild carrot plant, very pretty and lacey).
m-l: I believe it is.
It turns out that, of course, there is more than plant called Queen Anne’s lace, but perhaps only one called cow parsley (if we set aside giant cow parsley and french cow parsley). The latter is in the genus of the chervils. (Don’t confuse chervil with chive, as I sometimes do.)
The thing that we call Queen Anne’s lace over here is the same family but a different genus. In fact it is not a wild chervil but a wild carrot. And in fact it is such a close relative of the familiar domesticated carrot that it is considered the same species. Tall, though, and with a tapered root that is not sweet enough for human consumption but is a treat for horses.
I don’t know why for me the phrase “cow parsley”, or for that matter “cow parsnip”, brings up a mental image of cows grazing or dancing, or maybe sleepwalking, in nightgowns. Probably this doesn’t happen for the rest of you.
I wouldn’t mind getting an explanatory drawing of a cow in a nightgown – how do you know it’s not just a ghost of a cow?
Today I went to the Chelsea Physic Garden. What a place! I have pictures.
I think I figured it out: I was thinking of cowslips. Not knowing what a cowslip is, I tend to imagine that it is shaped like the woman’s garment called a slip; but I think of those undergarments as white and I would rather think of the flower as showy and colorful, so in imagination I make it into a sort of big bright shiny cowgown instead.
A cowslip is nothing like that. I just looked it up.
We have a happy little patch of cowslips thriving in our back garden. Plus one that we cropped accidentally, languishing in a small vase on the kitchen table.
Unless of course they’re oxlips.
We are awash with aquilegia at the mo’.
I was imagining a Friesian (Holstein) cow in a long white nightgown, in the style of Chagall, whereas it was a gayly coloured one more like this. I think of cowslips as being the same as primroses, but there may be subtle differences that I’m not aware of.
Quite nice to be awash in aquilegia.
Cowslips have flowers that are more closed and are supported on long stems; they also bloom later. Moreover primroses grow in our front garden, cowslips in our back. Easily distinguished.
We also have poppies, snow-in-summer, aubretia and lobelia blooming; the honesty has been in bloom for weeks, the forget-me-nots are finishing, and peonies opening. All very colourful.
Plus a fuchsia, a pelargonium, several cranesbills — and an ocean of ruddy dandelions. The sodding creeping buttercups are flowering too.
Belated thanks to Marie-Lucie for kind words about the LPP post. For some odd reason (?) I haven’t been receiving follow-up comments, despite subscription, so had missed that.
(Must make note to self to pop in more often, whether electronically notified or no. After all, there once did exist human communication without electronic prompting, if memory serves.)
Artur, it seems that the ash trees have not been faring so well in the less-enchanted sectors of your continent.
In Greece, for example.
Though now I see you are this week not in the North at all, but in London, and not even in North London at that.
How disorienting.
But perhaps Distance still has the power to lend enchantment to the view?
Gazing upon your stand of ashes, that does seem true — and hopefully not the last stand, at that.
Two natural opportunities have arisen recently to quote this old favourite; I thought I’d seize this unnatural opportunity.
Chap goes into a chemist’s shop in Sweden.
“May I have an a deodorant, please?”
“Aerosol?”
“No, it’s for my armpits.”
AJP, you weren’t on that flight by any chance?
“British Airways said the Heathrow to Oslo service turned back after a technical fault at about 09:00 BST. Witnesses reported seeing flames coming from the engine.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22655866
No. I hate Ryanair, SAS & British Airways (in that order) and only ever fly Norwegian to London (Gatwick). Thanks for asking, though.
A good joke, dearie although I’m not sure Swedish is the right accent. I’d go with Polish or Turkish, probably because I don’t know any.
Tom, that other post about ash trees was the sort of coincidence that must occur all the time, I suppose, but it’s fun to see that others are interested. A lot of people don’t like ash trees, but then a lot of people do all sorts of funny things.
I thought ash trees were dying of a parasite, or disease? Perhaps it won’t reach the “far” north.