Brent geese brought to life a lowering greyness in the sky overhead today. They have been arriving for the past few days looking for eelgrass to sustain them through the winter, until they make ready to leave again in March.
Category Archives for Visitors
Haircut
The dignity of the Beadle’s outward aspect was maintained on Monday when Daniel came from Lymington to cut my hair. He is now hairdresser to the Egg and I hope he will be able to return in the Winter. Some of the saved grey clippings will provide samples needed to mix with a blackberry and Lye mixture which in the Seventeenth Century was identified as the essential element of a permanent black hair dye. I shall experiment…
Cause & Effect
Rain water has been ingressing the Egg for some time and has been the active agent in creating the work on canvas ‘Stained Sun Shield’ (above), representing seven showers passing through the western red cedar shell during August. The source of the drips (Main Leak) was today the first focus for a week of remedial attention designed to weather proof the Egg for the challenges of WInter to come.
Egg Builder Paul Baker inspecting the exterior shell prior to treatment.
Canada Geese
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 Exbury Egg 