Little Red Riding Hood

Tags

acrylic painting, fairy tale, grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood, visiting the elderly

Acrylic painting by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Ghostly Rider

Tags

Bathurst Estate, Cirencester, Cotswolds, folly, ghostly effects, Gloucestershire, rider

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Garden Room

Tags

black and white chequered tile floor, Cotswold style, garden room, sculptural plaque

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Homesick on The Ridgeway

Tags

dustceawing, eawl-leet, hill-fort, holloways, Hran-rad, inosculation, invasion, Norsemen, petrichor, The Ridgeway

Who were these invaders?

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

 

 

Haunting the holloways, harrowed by hooves;

feeling our footfall fragment the flint.

Scanning the canopy’s inosculation,

we glybe through glossamer and squint in the glisk.

Dustsceawung is unavoidable:

dreams flit into smeause, like mice through a crack;

dilemmas dissolve through smoot holes.

Preoccupation is piffling to us.

We head for a hill-fort; spy on a settlement,

among the shadowtracks and shivelights

at the selvedge fray of a sown field.

After a shower, a pungent petrichor

permeates nostrils and a landskein

looms over the horizon, like smoke from their huts.

Soon it will be wolf-light; eawl-leet softens

and Heimweh’s heft hirples our hearts,

so we summon the sun wane

on the suthering tide, where we tied our ships.

May a spanging breeze freeze the salt in our beards!

Helmsmen, we long for the Hran-rad and home.

Hannah More (1745-1833)

Tags

anti-slavery, bas bleu, Belmont, Blagdon, Clapham set, Cowslip Green, Fishponds, Hannah More, Mendip Hills, nervous breakdown, philanthropist, religious tracts, Tyntesfield, Walpole

Hannah More by Pickersgill

A quennet for a woman who made a fortune with her pen:

 

fourth daughter   Gloucestershire born   Mendip Hills

poetic landscape

religious tracts   pastoral plays   Sunday education

nervous collapse

‘strange affair’    Bleeding Rock   jilted female

small annuity

bas bleu

Blagdon cottage

Clapham Sect

petticoat bishop

Cowslip Green

anti-slavery

bold philanthropist

strange plays   female education    pastoral landscape

religious rock.

 

 

Pando

Tags

adaptation, aspen, bryophytes, clones, cordate leaves, ldge pole pine, lepidoptera, Pando, Pluto, Populus tremuloides, ramets, rhizome, survival of the fittest

Image: Wikimedia Commons. USA Forest and Agriculture Department

 

 

Christ died on an aspen cross, woodmen thought.

Maybe that’s why, on slight provocation,

I quake and all my cordate leaves shiver,

so that I am known as ‘The Trembling Giant,’

aka Populus tremuloides.

Before men walked out of Africa and

when glaciers were scouring the planet,

I, Pando, was like a subterranean god –

not Pluto, but Pando, meaning ‘I spread.’

After flames have incinerated me,

my dormant rhizome will regenerate,

like resurgence of an old religion.

In times of trial, I just go underground;

in ideal circumstances, I can host

bryophytes; nurture lepidoptera.

I have the root of the matter in me,

but I share my vulnerability

with my multiple ramets – all my clones.

I haven’t flowered for ten thousand years,

in spite of a rigorous self-pruning.

See where black scars mutilate my white bark.

Invasive lodge pole pine may steal my light

and pocket gophers gnaw my root system,

but I sprout from this volcanic soil.

What I lack in diversity,

I’ll exchange for durability, for

we suckers just plan to stay together,

even when a highway runs right through us.

Master of the art of adaptation,

I will survive when all else is ashen.

 

Tired of Being Put on a Pedestal

Tags

Buscot Park, Cotswolds, Egyptian, Oxfordshire, put on a pedestal, Sculpture, statuary

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Pandemic Pastimes

Tags

absorption, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam, Old Masters, pandemic pastimes, re-interpretation, reading

Photo I captured of a paper napkin my friend issued me yesterday. It apparently came from the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, so full marks to the artist and some free publicity!

St Hilaire, Talmont-sur-Gironde

Tags

Charente-Maritime, French churches, Gironde, Romanesque, St Hilaire, Talmont

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Organ Pipes

Tags

Buckland St Mary church, church organ, organ pipes

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart