Good Friday

A quiet week, this morning's walk was slightly drizzly but sunny at the same time.  Yes it has been dry for a long time, the ground is rock hard and the river low, so rain would be welcome.  Fairly early, the tractor was just leaving the farm yard to plough the field, frightening the hare who stood in solitary splendour hardly visible against the reddish-brown earth.  The tractor made a straight line to the buzzard tree, and the buzzard watched its movement almost up to the tree and then flew away in long sweeping curves.  Lucy was also fascinated by the tractor and got left behind as she gazed with curiosity at this interloper into her world.  Rabbits galore bounded away from us. The  blossom of the wild cherry trees beside the road is out, small rather tasteless fruit later on.  Nelson's hens have been laying their eggs in the hedgerow, and he has acquired some goats, three kids and two nanny goats.

Everything bursts forth with a rampant eye for domination, there is blue in the painting as well, forget-me-nots, the small bugle and an escapee, grape hyancinth wanders illicitly along a bank.  Across on the other side the leaves of meadowsweet thrust through. Underfoot on the wide grassy swathes ground elder  and the great dock leaves, nettles, all 'thug' wild plants make their presence known.  A curse on the free use of nitrogen on our fields!

So to one plant whose name is intriguing.  Now is the time for dog mercury, (mercury perennis) a small unassuming plant that grows where old woodland was once, Grigson describes it as 'so country people called this gloomy crop-plant of damp woods and leaf moulds and dead twigs after boggarts and snakes'

Anything having the term 'dog' applied always means it is inferior or bad and so it is with this woodland plant.  'It is an emetic, and dangerously purgative, causing irritant and narcotic symptons'

So this boggart-flower, dog flower, snake's food, may have come from a German translation, all to do with Good King Henry, the plant of course, which Grigson goes on to elaborate.
And before I forget, which I did, the barn owl has been missing from Bridge Farm for a fortnight, but I did see one hunting by Salton lane a couple of days ago.  Also, spied two swallows in the sky diving over the fields, though not nesting yet at the church.

Albrecht Durer - Young Hare

And a Happy Easter to everyone, do not eat too much chocolate and definitely stay away from Dog Mercury if you do...