Production will begin shortly of a limited edition of six bottles of Vin de Mûres, made from specially selected blackberries ripened on west facing bushes along The Gateway to the Egg. The fruits have been hand picked and the fermentation process is imminent for this new wine, from La Maison d’Oeuf.
Seamus Heaney’s poem called Blackberry Picking was sent to me just a couple of days ago in response to my ongoing fascination with this bountiful plant, but without mention of his death at the end of August (news of which just penetrated my thin cedar walls). I walked out tonight as the sun set along my abundant avenue of fruit laden bushes, whose every stem seemed home to the green, to the ripe and to the gone to seed. Nothing’s lasts forever, except perhaps its memory.
Marshmallow rises up through the tall grass within twenty metres of the Egg (N 50˚47.142′ W 001˚24.449′). The French began to use pith from the stems of this plant, boiled with sugar, as a chewy sweet in the 19th century. They later tried whipping the pulped roots with egg white and rose water to create the light airy confection that todays purely sugar and gelatine marshmallows are derived from. The plant may be scarce in this environment and need to be left untouched, but if more are found nearby I will make my own confection as an after dinner treat – and as a further reminder of our long cultural relationship with all that is living around us.
Hundreds of thousands of blackberries are beginning to ripen along the path below the Egg Gateway. Evidence on the gatepost shows birds to be already feasting and I made my own modest collection for breakfast tomorrow.
Around one hundred and fifty Canada geese arrived yesterday in the early evening, appearing from the direction of the Isle of Wight. They were letting everything and everyone know they were coming with that raucous, noisy honking that ripples too and fro throughout the flying flock. Two small resident groups already here, frequent a pond on farmland adjoining Exbury Gardens and it is beginning to feel like the start of a Canada goose convention. I watched a pair of shell (shocked) ducks seemingly retreating out of their way.
These naturalised Canadians first settled in England in the 17th Century when they were introduced as attractions in the gardens of country estates and perhaps our local flocks still have some distant race memory of ornamental forebears on the Exbury Estate? I shall have to ask if any were ever kept hereabouts.
The sun set toward Beaulieu in beguiling fashion yesterday evening as I recorded the event to test the GoPro camera’s capacity for time lapse photography from a bright to no light situation. I will need use a different camera to shoot the night sky. The sun goes down every day in greater or lesser glory, but what is really happening in the air it shines through and on land and water here in my parish below?
The land is relatively vast in proportion to capacity for observation and reflection, so I am considering different means to focus my looking. Borrowing the principle of the planning grid from archaeology which is employed to trace layers in the land peeled back in time, I will observe the present surface and its future changes.
A square metre is just one stride out of thousands made in a single day and so different locations along the littoral must be strategically chosen. It feels like a good way to begin contemplation of whatever washes up, lives and dies, or erodes within such tiny windows onto the world.
This window is at N59˚47.129′ & W001˚24.453′ and my Garmin cannot quantify if it is at three or one foot above mean sea level. The ‘spirit’ level is of as much interest to me.
Damselfly are flitting from leaf to leaf beside the water on my parish border with the adjacent Exbury Gardens. They briefly land all facing the same way and long enough sometimes for a photograph.
The Exbury Egg 