a few seeds, A book and some trees…

In March this year, I was fortunate to be a finalist in the Mslexia Single Poem Competiton 2023, judged by Fiona Benson - my poem ‘Living with Bluebeard’ was published in Mslexia 101, their March/ April/ May 2024 issue. I was thrilled to discover in it an article by art critic and writer Laura Cumming about her writing process - I loved her recent book Thunderclap, about, amongst other things, the Dutch painter Fabritius, and an enigmatic painting by him to which she had returned over many years, hanging in the National Gallery in London.

I had come across a heartfelt and generous recommendation for Thunderclap by ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, and by chance, I noticed the book in the Scottish National Gallery bookshop in Edinburgh, while I was there with my mother in March. How one thing leads to another… I had no idea that its author, Laura Cumming, had grown up in Edinburgh, nor that her book starts with descriptions of trips to the gallery where I had found her book, and reflections on some of the paintings at which we had just been looking. I love the way someone can enlarge your experience with an account of their own, and the mysterious alchemy by which enthusiasm passes from one person another.

I was born in Edinburgh, a December baby, and the trip with my mother was a chance to discover places of which I had little recollection. She took me to the beautiful Botanic Gardens, near where we had lived then, and where she had pushed a pram day in, day out, through the early months of the year. But for our visit it was unseasonably warm. The azaleas and rhododendron were all flowering in a shock of colour, magenta, wild. Wandering along paths under still-young sequoias that towered above us, I wondered how they would have looked from a pram, and if this was where I had first begun to form my deep love of trees. I collected a few dusty cones which were scattered on the ground - small tight kernels, nothing like the loose, spikey tongues of an open pine cone - and it was only later, taking them out of my pocket and putting them on the table, that a few scattered seeds fell out, They were tiny, papery, almost entirely unrelated to the cones that had housed them, or the great trees from which they had come.

By coincidence, when I was at Glenstal Abbey in Ireland the previous April, which has deep woodland and an arboretum, the tree custodian, Father Anthony, told me that the sequoias there, already quite large, had been grown from seeds sent as a gift from the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. So it was good to encounter the parent trees in Scotland, an enlivening expansion of an earlier experience. And perhaps words too are seeds. They travel out into the world, and we don’t know how or where they will land and take root.

In other news, one of my pamphlets was also long listed for the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition 2023, judged by Imtiaz Dharker.