Jane Wheeler's Blog books

the flowers of the forest

Posted jane -->on 25th Jun 2019

a well-timed visit to scotland in mid-June, where the weather was cool but sunny in contrast to saturated Norfolk

we had several beach walks, some here on West Sands in front of St Andrews’ golf course, early mornings before family went to work

low tides gave us plenty of room

although one of us is very sadly a bit too arthritic to play games on the beach

I visited Big Cat Textiles in Newburgh, on the Tay estuary, had lunch with old friends on the last day of Michel Garcia’s plant dyeing course. everyone was extremely busy rinsing, printing, ironing, drying in a fever of time limits, I pottered in the shop, bought some of Alison Mountain’s deliciously dyed merino/silk/yak knitting yarn.

Jeanette Sendler showed me a marvellous book from their library, of Sheila Hicks’ small tapestry works, Weaving as Metaphor, which ought to inform some abstract paintings soon; if I were not already doing too many projects it would have me going back to this art form which I tried in my twenties.

back at St Andrews – Bims is so much more grown up now she is three and there were no floor/carpet tragedies.

on the Saturday we went for a walk at Tentsmuir near the mouth of the Tay estuary – in fact between two estuaries, the Eden flows out to the south and the beach here at low tide appears to join up with West Sands, but in between are sandbanks, quicksands and a river. Tentsmuir forest is forestry commission, but the seaward edges are very au naturel, low sandy hillocks covered with some marram and some machair-type vegetation, full of flowers. this is an area full of ancient archaeology, which used to be turned up by rabbits until the myxomatosis disaster. it’s also next to a military zone. a place full of complications and connections.

to my delight this June it is full of northern marsh orchids, some flower heads five inches long. I was so excited by the orchids I didn’t take enough notice of all the other flowers.

Bims had another fantastic run and play

then back on the lead and into the woods

more orchids along the trail

woods in Scotland have totally different understoreys to english woods, fern, lichen, and moss are king

old birches growing out of mossy humps and cushions

someone had put a painted stone in a hole in this tree – green with red lips and white teeth, a kind of baby dinosaur face.

on Sunday we went further afield, into Angus, near Forfar, Montreathmont Forest.

it’s Forestry Commission like Tentsmuir, but much of what we walked was open like this, some spruce but a lot of scots pine and forest floor covered in a mixture of ferns, mosses, heather and bilberry.

there are supposed to be capercaillies, but I think you would have to be up at dawn to hear them.

more flowers – a lot of bugle – occasional orchids – beautiful dark blue speedwells

and this which I now think is wild grape hyacinth – I found the native version in Simon Harrap’s very thorough Wild Flowers, although the flower head is usually more like the garden variety, except that it’s a really dark smoky blue, and in this photo the blue is too bright.

we followed some marked paths through open meadow (where the bugles followed lines across the grass) with alders and birches, and then through more of the “Caledonian Forest” style woods, delightfully not forest trails.

Lucy had downloaded the OS map for the walk, and there was supposed to be a path near here, in an open strip similar to this, with a little burn/ditch, but no sign of the path, in very long wet grass

then as the grass was so long and wet we tried the edge of the wood, but the moss and heather cushions were knee high, so that was not any easier

we crossed the burn/stream/ditch – luckily there was a ledge or the remains of a bridge where the path had been

through drier/shorter grass and a landscape of fern clumps growing out of their own humps/stumps and some birch, alder and then heather and broom. then the open landscape ended in a wood. the path was supposed to go through it, parallel to a straight forest ride. we had to push/crawl through small spruce and gorse, ended up soaked and our clothes and hair full of pine needles. the spruce branches low sharp and painful. at last we fought our way through to the high gorse edge of the trail, I had to sit on a gorse bush to allow Bimba through. real forest bathing – and my hip has still not recovered completely.

the trail also petered out, but that was marked on the map, and the path it turned into had recently been tended with some branches cut. finally we were back on track to where the car was parked.

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wandering in a winter wood

Posted jane -->on 19th Dec 2018

most of the trees have dropped all their leaves now but this oak still has plenty. it’s on the edge of the wood by the bottom of the green lane

the hazels have their catkins all ready to expand as soon as february or before if it’s mild

there’s a section of the wood that seems in a state of collapse. it is mostly elm and ash; the elms get to a certain height then the bark boring beetles find them and spread the fungal disease Ascomycota. the tree reacts by plugging its own xylem tissue with gum and tyloses, bladder-like extensions of the xylem cell wall. As the xylem (one of the two types of vascular tissue produced by the vascular cambium, the other being the phloem) delivers water and nutrients to the rest of the plant, these plugs prevent them from travelling up the trunk of the tree, starving the tree of water and nutrients, therefore, eventually killing it. but the roots are still alive and send up new shoots, so there is a continuous cycle of growth and death in the wood.

at the moment there seems more death, and rafts of dead trees block the old paths.

on the other side of the wood the spring-fed pools are still dry. at the end of the winter last year this was a large pond. the water bubbles up from the bottom when the spring runs.

the bare branches catching low sunlight. there were long-tailed tits, and then another bird I wasn’t sure of, possibly pied wagtails, running along the high branches, with a “plink plink” call.

oaks

and beech predominate – there are some monsters

holly in the lower storeys,

making domed hallways

while hazel grows in these bushy forms, flexible and sometimes trapped into archways

and ancient carcasses sprawl across the woodland floor. but no ash in this main part of the wood.

the wet nature of this land with its springs, sumps, swamps and little stream

means it’s not suitable for agriculture, though I worry the owner may want to exploit it for growing trees for biomass – hopefully the expense of draining would prevent that. terrible idea anyway.

it’s quite easy to get lost in here, paths entice and bring you only to bramble patches and more fallen trees

as there are so many deer – red, roe and muntjac – I wanted to see if young trees were growing. I recently read an extract of Oliver Rackham’s book on the ash tree, in which he said that woodland oaks were not reproducing due to oak mildew, and hazels due to squirrels. deer nip off young growth too.

I found several young beech trees but no oaks, and plenty of hazels.

our hedgerow oaks had bumper crops of acorns this year. most oaks grow from forgotten jay stashes.

I’m standing in the soft peaty earth and leaf litter of the dry pond.

there are many standing elms, some dead and some alive, protected by the other trees.

down here in the almost forgotten centre of the labyrinth I try to find my slow way home.

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more folded books – Orkney part four

Posted jane -->on 1st Dec 2018

here are our lengths of paper, painted and drawn on in the dyeing shed, brought indoors to fold and cut;

put together the whole is more. we used japanese ink sticks rubbed onto flat stones from the beach with water, and peat from the burn banks, making brushes or finding twigs and other materials to make marks.

we had embroidered squares and dyed them to make book covers

padded with pieces from the floor-covering old blankets that had been used to protect the billiard room carpet from our activities. however, on advice I left my book uncovered, and used those pieces of silk joined to other pieces to make another tsunobokuro bag. which has since gone to wrap my daughter’s birthday presents ….

but there was more –

we stitched papers into the book

from the selection in our first present of materials, from Alison – old map pieces

tracing paper, and the rubbings I had done of George Mackay Brown’s words around the pool in the garden

sewn in with linen thread

a new artist’s book. an interesting technique which needs none of the usual materials for book binding beyond aul, needle and thread.

then we worked with Alison with colour again on our last afternoon

by this time I had loosened up a great deal.

I used the watercolour tubes I’d brought, on papers from Alison’s contribution

and on this one, the vegetable dyes and oil bars she’d brought.

then I added some colour to the sketchbook from our trip

it melted the fountain pen ink

and is rather gestural instead of “filling in”

but in some cases I think I did a bit too much

however on the whole I’m pleased, and

intend to make more sketchbooks in this way

perhaps on the writing outside courses; the next one starts in January.

a slow look at the sound on our last morning, and a slow look back from a grey seal. a place to stick in the mind, and a wonderfully productive week with “sister stitchers” – keeping in touch via instagram –

I have already obtained a copy of George Mackay Brown’s A Portrait of Orkney, and ordered his collected poems.

on the subject of poems

my poem is out in the Rialto, very exciting

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the colours of the land; Orkney part two

Posted jane -->on 26th Nov 2018

some people assumed that there would not be much in the way of leaves to dye with here in Orkney towards the end of November, and that the weather would be too awful to get outside much. but in fact the weather was mild and open; some days the sun shone all the short hours it was up.

the low lying islands make the sky huge, and there is light reflected from the surrounding and interlocking water of sea and loch.

at the bottom of the garden at Woodwick House the island of Wyre is a low hump across the sound, and the sea constantly changes colour

and the bare trees form a patterned screen – in this case

Rousay is the pink land under the pink cloud on the horizon, caught by the setting sun.

in George Mackay Brown’s book Magnus he describes this group of islands, ten including the mainland which he gives its old name, Hrossey (horse island) “the islands shift their places around the firth, Hrossey, Eynhallow, Rousay, Gairsay, Shapinsay, Wyre, Eday, Sanday, Stronsay, Egilsay” as Magnus and his men sail/row across the sound towards his martyrdom on Egilsay

on the beach there is a thick wreath of seaweed, coloured from ochre to rust to deep wine-purple, amongst stones that are lighter versions of the same colours, and at low tide, fine grey sand, ripple marked.

from the beach you can walk back up beside the burn, as it pours over the rock steps and pools in treacle brown depths

on a path through shrubs and trees

with secret spots to hide and read a book or draw,

leant over by tree branches. from the name I suppose there must always have been trees here.

quaint post and rails – the seabird skull my addition, a find from the beach –

snow drop bulbs everywhere in bare earth and humous, already starting to sprout green horns.

at the top there’s what they call in scotland a doo-cot – a dove cote

with compartments for all the pigeon nests, providing baby pigeons for pies. whether this is a genuine really old one is hard to say, but it’s been made into a sort of pagan chapel

a quiet contemplative place

beside the sound of the rushing burn

at the gate before the bridge

and at the other side of the house there are castellated turrets – a late Victorian fancy. the gates are missing, anyway, and the path down the to the sea is public.

the hens are the rightful owners of the garden, six of them, and with no foxes they don’t have to be shut in at night.

this one is the boss, she’s twelve years old. one day they laid four eggs!

inside we had been hard at work stitching on paper, watercolour, or other special paper – some hand made. I had brought heavy weight watercolour, and it was brutal to stitch on, so mine was quite minimal. others filled up their three pieces with masses of abstract stitching and pieces of fabric.

then we made folded books, into which we inserted leaves/and seaweed

wrapped them into parcels with cloth

and after a brief cook

opened our little treasures, at the same time adding to our drip-sheets/abstract paintings (Japanese inksticks ground on beach stones and peat from the burn-side, using sticks and home-made brushes, and yes, fingers)

they looked gorgeous when wet

though this lovely rusty brown

dried to something a bit duller.

the drip-lengths were made into something very exciting on the last day.

when you work with leaves and stitches your eyes get tuned into all the fine details of the landscape

things you might walk past before, suddenly shine out at you with their beauty.

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the fortress of the high powers

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

the last day of the course at Ty Newydd was a trip into Snowdonia, hill-walking with storytelling and heightened speech.

we drove up the Nantlle valley from the coast on the Anglesey side

through the pass to a high reservoir

where we stopped so that two of us could deliver their invocation/heightened speech in the spirit of place

the weather collaborated and while the utterances were in progress we were enveloped in a hail storm.

we stood close together like penguins keeping warm in a snowstorm. reading from an ipad covered in melting hail was quite a feat, having climbed up a very steep little hill.

although the weather was uncomfortable at times, it would not have been so atmospheric without the huge fast moving clouds and intermittent sunshine.

we drove on to Beddgelert, refreshed and warmed ourselves, and those able to march up hills and scramble over rocks continued to Dinas Emrys, to encounter dragons and fortresses.

it’s a National Trust site. I am not normally fond of carved wood things on walks, but this dragon bench is very fine. the scales on its back stood up five inches proud of the spine, its tail, with similar scales, made a a complete three hundred and sixty degree turn at the other end of the seat, and huge claws splayed out at each end. Here Eric (Maddern, one of the course leaders) began his tale of Merlin’s prophesies at Dinas Emrys, taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. the story features the welsh red dragon defeating the saxon white dragon.

we walked on through woods on mossy paths and up and down stone steps

the hill we were walking to is probably a volcanic plug; it sits between the higher mountains – on the west side Moel Hebog, which blocks any view of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) itself, and on the east, Grib Ddu with Moel y Dyniewd higher behind,

in the valley of Afon (river) Glaslyn

we passed waterfalls – this the biggest, with its pool of blue stones

and a huge quartz block, a pulpit stone

then more stone steps as we climbed higher

through wood

and pasture

higher

with views of wooded hills

and bare mountains

until we reached the narrow neck of land

and the steep path

connecting Dinas Emrys

a very defensible precipitous path, looking down to the Arfon Glaswyn valley

coming down, after the rain which began soon after we got to the top, I slid on my bum over the steepest rockiest part, it seemed safer.

here the view of the lake

looking down to Llyn Dinas

at the top at last, to sit in the square of what are probably the foundations of an eleventh century tower, and listen to the last part of Eric’s re-telling.

below the tower is a hollow place with a pool, a natural amphitheatre. it was choked with rush and the ground covered with bracken, but Eric has been clearing it, and now the eye is open. in one of my favourite children’s books, written in 1959, the Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, this place is reimagined as the mountain hideaway not of Vortigern, but of Ambrosius, the son of the leader Vortigern betrayed when he brought in the saxon warbands led by Hengist and Horsa. she uses the name Dinas Ffaraon and translates it as Fortress of the High Powers. Emrys is the Welsh version of Ambrosius, but it also means immortal one. her description of the approach, from the lake, although it’s not the way we came up, has the same feel of mystery and magic. “The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out onto bare, mist wet rock” and she places Ambrosius in the hollow place at the moment of meeting the main character, Aquila, “on the edge of a little hollow with the gleam of water at the bottom of it” Aquila hears the notes of a harp from buildings in this hollow, and finds Ambrosius within.

re-reading this book I get the feeling that Rosemary Sutcliff was quite an influence on my own writing; her strong sense of place, and detail of plants and animals make her fiction intense and vivid.

as we searched out fallen wood for our fire, and Eric dug away rush and turf from the stones, it began to hail. nevertheless the fire was lit and we ten uttered our heightened speech to our chosen entity; to the lost eagles of Snowdon, to the Green Man, to Pan, to Rhiannon (that was me), Artemis, Myrddin, Math, Sophia, Thor, and Taliesin.

although we couldn’t see Snowdon from the reservoir because of the cloud, when I left Wales the next morning I caught a glimpse of it, covered in a light dusting of snow, from the Porthmadog bypass. it’s on the very left edge of the photo and soon the cloud covered it again.

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a Welsh setting

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

and a quite extraordinary week for me, really quite out of my depth.

this is Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales, also, David Lloyd George’s last home. he lived there for the last three years of his life and died in the library in 1945, overlooking Cardigan Bay; he is buried a little way down the road into Llanystumdwy near the river Dwyfor.

it’s a beautiful place, both the lane and the river, and the woods that surround them.

tall sessile oaks and ashes line the drive

the garden is full of trees – here a huge maple

and the light everywhere mellowed by autumn leaves

it seemed to me a very colourful landscape

here enhanced a bit by the hipstamatic app on my phone

but still, there was a glow that I’m not finding back in Norfolk.

the course I was on, Heightened Speech, was sub-titled “a Spell on the Tongue” and was just one in an annual series of storytelling courses that have been going on for about twenty years, led by Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton. almost everyone had been on one before, some people have been attending them for years, and are professional story tellers.

as I haven’t even got one poem by heart I did feel a little bit of a fake.

here’s the back of the house, looking out over the lawn to a small gate where there’s a footpath to the sea, about a mile and a half away. some of the accommodation is under the same roof as offices, libraries, kitchen, dining room – which is the medieval heart of the house, the old hall where we did a lot of the work – warming up body and voice, and taking the oral tradition up its “ladder to the moon” from riddle and nursery rhyme, to the heights of invocation and praise-singing

via Lloyd George himself, other speechmakers like Martin Luther King

curses, charms and spells,

prophesies, song, poetry

and storytelling. stories were told from the Welsh Mabinogion, from native American and First Nation Traditions, Aboriginal Australian, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, from India, and further east.

the course was a rich smorgasbord of magical worlds and the voices are still in my head

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print and words week 2

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

so when you have strips like this and your tutor says she thinks you should slice them into even narrower strips …

you think for two minutes and then you take the risk ….

and stick words on and fold …

and then the print looks even more like manuscript illumination

and you cut up your poem

and find the words are so much more brilliant isolated on their long narrow pages

like jewels

and you print more in an afternoon of adrenalin

and more ideas are offered

that you need days more to explore

and at home

you tear and fold what you printed

and cut up another poem

that you are in the middle of writing

hoping this process will clarify

its labour-pains

and then

you have two more concertina books a little more resolved

being pressed between boards

to flatten and many thoughts towards more.

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print and words week 1

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

I’ve just taken part in two workshops with Tara Sampey and Jonathan Ward (he leads the Writing Outside courses I’ve been doing at the Cley Wildlife trust visitor centre)

these centred around a walk through fields and a holloway in Edgefield, Jonathan’s home patch.

we collected words and plants

and chatted

sharing a sense of wonder at the small details – overnight rain had collected on these funnel spider webs and turned them into a constellation of shining drops around the black hole of the spiders’ traps

it seems that we have not had rain for weeks and weeks, but there had been some showers (that was about ten days ago)

and the swallows were hawking low over green barley fields

linnets and whitethroats singing in bushy hedgerows

a sad very dead pair of elms loom over a small meadow pasture full of insects

the hedges full of pattern making us greedy pickers beautiful things to print with

back at the hall we were shown how to roll ink onto the gel plates to make monoprints

the mind-bending part is how to make use of the negative image produced by the first print, and the delicately detailed positive which comes after you peel the plant material off the plate

some of the images reminded me of medieval manuscript illuminations

the really exciting part is when you start printing a negative in a different colour over the positive, off-setting

and generally playing about with part of the plate …

so we went home excited, to play with words at home and make some texts which could be combined with the images

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back to Totleigh Barton

Posted jane -->on 4th Oct 2016

two weeks ago I was at the Arvon retreat, the old farmhouse at Totleigh Barton in Devon, for the excitingly named Poetry as a Controlled Explosion creative writing course with Jane Draycott and Jack Underwood

this was different from the Ann and Peter Sansom course, in which we wrote in eight exercises each morning and generated masses of material.

instead we looked at how to make our poems more explosive and then how to control them (to some extent) and the exercises were two or three a morning with more time to work the poems out.

I have at least six good ones, I think.

we were luckier with the weather than in May. early mornings were misty, and developed into days of sun and cloud

which allowed sitting outside to write and eat lunch by the end of the week.

I think I have more idea about how to push my poems in different directions

the Devon landscape is inspiring, but so were the people on the course.

there were a couple of young mentees of the Poetry Business, both at Oxbridge, and three other youngsters, and three published poets.

some spectacular writing was done

and some bonding

a lot of walking, along the banks of the Torridge

into Sheepwash, the nearest village

I think this is an addictive experience and I am very likely to visit Totleigh Barton again next year.

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barley fields and more

Posted jane -->on 12th Aug 2016

I have just put up the fruits of my almost four weeks of painting in the village hall on the walls of said hall, to share them with the users of the hall, and anyone else who wants to see them. so tonight we have our monthly fish and chips night and it’s a bit like a private view, and I’m feeling rather nervous!

things have moved on since my last blog, I’ve mostly gone forward with the same sort of idea as the painting of the barleyfield and the blue horizon trees, or at least I have tried to, and made my painting as loose as I can, closing in on small portions of some of the other paintings,

(this is from one I painted back in late winter)

or working more loosely from photos. on each one I am learning more, how much I need to simplify, but draw convincingly with the brush

letting the brush strokes themselves tell the story

trying canvas again after fifteen or so years, this one had its own special difficulties

but this little tree worked

this is a coarser canvas which is quite problematic to work on if you want loose brush strokes to work. I think this is too much dark too early

but I arrived at this, eventually and I’m pleased with its overall simplicity

this one started simple

ended up a little overdone

going for more simple

after painting this one, they both have their good points, I think …

a bit different, from a very dark photo which allowed me to invent more …. but the red came from the original image, I kept it because it’s so strong.

then I revisited the barley field with the blue trees, pulled out this oak from the soft and smoky background, it’s on a linen canvas, which is SO much nicer to paint on, an old painting, I just restretched it with the back uppermost.

it’s great to see them displayed together, with a couple of older pieces

framing makes them look very much more grown up

I haven’t got as far as framing any more (huge expense)

the canvases at least don’t absolutely need it like the ply panel ones

but at least the white paper background helps a bit.

fourteen altogether. so now, what about all that clay, and coil pot work waiting to be done?

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