Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
I don’t open it but I stand in front of it for a moment and think this could be a studio. I imagine a workbench under one of the windows. I imagine drying flowers from the rafters. I imagine the smell of turpentine and lavender and the even light a north-facing window would give me in the afternoons. It’s too bad there’s no electrical hookup, but maybe I could get a portable heater for the colder days. I doubt Amazon delivers out here—another inconvenience I’ll have to get used to—but perhaps I could pick one up in Fort William or Inverness, when I feel like driving a couple of hours.
It’s a project for sure, the first of many.
The plants around the shed are hanging on past their reasonable bloom time because I was told July was unseasonably warm. There’s yarrow growing in a clump beside the door, white flat-topped clusters going slightly brown at the edges—Achillea millefolium, called milfoil by people who don’t know any better. My dad called it the soldier’s herb and told me Achilles stanched the wounds of his men with it (depending on which translation of Homer you trust). I crouch and crush a leaf between my fingers and breathe in. Bitter, peppery, faintly medicinal.
There’s also self-heal—Prunella vulgaris, small violet-purple flowers in a tight cylindrical head—growing in the shorter grass toward the path. Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks. A few late thistles, some starkly pink and purple while others are going to seed, the silken white of their seedheads soft as cobweb in the still air. Sea pinks past their flowering, the dried magenta heads still rattling on the rocks closer to the shore.
These aren’t just plants, these are cunning-folk plants, the kind that the wise and revered herbalists (or folk healers) of the village would use to solve problems. Every plant has been placed here for a reason or, more likely, every plant has been allowed to grow here for a reason. Effie didn’t pull what she didn’t need to, that much I can tell. And while she never said outright in any of her writing that she considered herself as one of the cunning-folk, I knew she was.
I straighten up, feel my hips complain, and turn to look up the slope toward the road.
There’s a copse of trees on the higher ground, a small stand of stunted Scots pine and birch and, at the edge, a hawthorn or two, sitting where my property bends toward the single-track road that brought me here. It’s the only patch of real cover on the spit. A botanical illustrator’s instinct says that’s where the interesting plants are, because anywhere else on this spit is exposed to wind and salt, and the things growing in the woods will be a different ecology entirely.
This morning the copse is barely visible with the fog having settled into the trees. The trunks are dark verticals against the pale grey, and the spaces between them are darker still, the kind of dark that swallows the eye. I can’t see more than a few meters in. The trees aren’t moving. Nothing is moving. The whole forest has the stillness of a held breath.
I want to go in.
This is the part of me that’s spent fifteen years being a botanical illustrator, that excited thrill of discovering something new. Unexplored ground in a foggy morning is exactly the conditions under which the best fieldwork happens. It’s like the plants you find on a clear day are pretty but common plants, but the plants you find on a damp, still, foggy morning are mystical. They’re old plants, woodland plants, plants that don’t tolerate a lot of light. There could be wood sorrel in there. There could be whitlow grass. There could be the kind of mossy, lichenous, cold-loving growth a coastal Highland copse holds in pockets the rest of the world doesn’t get.
I stand at the edge of the slope and look at the trees in anticipation.
The trees don’t look back, exactly. They’re just trees, after all. I’m not a person who anthropomorphizes vegetation, except occasionally when drinking. But I have a thing—a small, possibly silly thing—that I trust about the way certain places feel when I’m alone in them. And the woods this morning, is a no in my body. The same no I get when I’m standing at the entrance to an empty parking garage at night.
So I don’t go in. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.
Besides, the fog is bad, my fibro is grumpy, and I don’t have my full kit and shouldn’t be doing botanical fieldwork without my pressing materials anyway. I turn around and walk back to the cottage, and only when I’m at the back door with my hand on the latch do I realize I haven’t looked back at the woods since I turned.