Violets

Have you noticed how many violets there are this year?

The warmer weather has drawn them out. They peep from the hedgerows, the verges, the woodland. Tiny, purple, delicate. This year they have had a chance to bloom before the more robust plants like nettles and grasses crowd them out. They glow in the dappled sunlight filtered through the trees soft, spring leaves. When you at them closely, like a child might, they look like the iris does inside, just a quieter cousin.

Just as the trees and sun tend the violet, the violet’s flowers offer food for us, jewelled additions to salads or sugar coated candied on wedding cakes.

The seeds and roots provide sustenance for mice, voles and other small mammals and aphids and slugs suck on the leaves and stems. Bees and butterflies feast on their early season nectar, indeed, I feel that there are more bees around this spring time too.

In herbalism the violet is seen as cooling and calming. When ingested it can stimulate the lymphatic system, can help with respiratory ailments and can sooth irritated skin.

 

Awe

What fascinates me increasingly as I get older is how, if I pay attention, real, focused, present attention, right here, right now, on even something this small, then it is a gateway to just how interconnected we are with nature and the un-heeded magnificence which we often fail to even notice.

And the noticing brings me into a state of awe. Awe, that state of reverence, wonder, for me a sense of being blessed, not by some otherworldly god or being, but this is place we call home.

So when on the news this week we hear astro-physicists get excited about a gas on distant planet K2-18b, which on earth would be produced by marine plankton and bacteria, I smile. Because whilst I get the human urge to look beyond, discover, imagine, question, research, I feel that often by looking too far forward, or upward, or outward, we miss the beauty of this place we call home.

 

Oak

And we are careless with it. On 3rd April a 500 year old oak , 6 meters in diameter, was cut down in Enfield, by a Toby Carvery.

500 year old.

Imagine.

1525.

Pre black death. Pre Elizabeth 1, pre enlightenment, before the industrial revolution, before Australia was ‘discovered’ by Cooke, before the French Revolution, the Napoleonic War, the American Civil War, before Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, Marie-Currie, the moon landings, the World Wars, before equalities legislation for women, people of colour, disabilities, before gay rights, trans rights (still in place even though the definition is what it is to be a woman has been found to be biological).

All for a Toby Carvery.

And this, 2 days after a report calling for increased rights of trees. And even this report make me wince as it talks about how we should project trees that have significance to humans (eg trees where historical events took place) and where trees are deemed to provide ‘eco-system services’ such as those illustrated in the report by Hannah Rigden.

 

Relationship

To me this looks like a whole set or relationships, inter-dependencies, connections rather than ‘services’!

When we change our language we change how we feel.  ‘Services’ are clinical, impersonal, transactional. ‘Relationships’ are organic, mutual, shifting, changing, reciprocal and I know which world I feel like I inhabit.

We can’t put that big, old tree back. But we can protect those in our gardens, on our localities. The protestors and protectors of this tree lost this time, but we have to keep on doing it any way. They are worth fighting for. Do you know an old oak supports up to 2300 other forms of life as the Woodland Trust shows:

Notice with curiosity

So noticing violets and their web of connections means we are more likely not to tread on them or dig them out or put chemical on them or pick them. Noticing the trees in our gardens, our streets, our communities and paying attention to the webs they live within, how we breathe in oxygen that they breathe out, means we are less likely to cut them down with impunity.

So I leave you with some images of my noticing and invite you into moments of awe with the world beyond the human this weekend.  Get really curious about the web of relationships we live within.

 

 

 

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Thanks for being here.
Julie

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