I am currently having a love affair with ferns, walking down the lanes these past few weeks is just sheer heavenly delight...they are soooo vibrant, they give off a kind of electric vibrancy that merely being in their presence is energising
Being in nature this morning with the first burst of sun for a few days is such a treat...John Burroughs expresses it perfectly:
"To find universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a birds nest or a wild flower in spring- these are some of the rewards of a simple life."
and Walt Whitman..."I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,"
This Hogweed seedhead below is just like a starburst....
I really love botanical illustrations and I came across these incredible early 20th century illustrations a while ago by Ernst Haeckel on a site called Wikimedia Commons, where the pictures are free to use.
I just think these drawings are exquisite and other wordly...... such reverence for nature in this microscopic detail is unbelievably divine
I was so fortunate as a young child to go to a small village primary school, My first teacher was Mrs Templeman and I loved her, of course it was back in the days when teachers weren't restricted by National Curriculum and were free to engage with thier young students however they chose, fortunately Mrs Templman chose to take us on long walks every fine day, catching insects in the fields and drawing them, playing in the stream, fishing for newts and small fish, looking for frogs under cool stones and marveling for hours over tadpoles...in the afternoon she might read to us under a tree from "The Magic Faraway Tree", one summer holiday my friend and I spent weeks gathering moss to build our very own slippery slip down the riverbank..imagine our disapointment when it didn't work.
Later at secondary school I studied Rural science and never tired of spending hours doing detailed drawings of stamens and sepals and seed heads from our very enthusiastic teacher. I really believe that these two teachers had such an impact and influence on me and I'm so grateful that my love of nature remained intact.
The drawings below remind me of creatures from a Leonora Carrington painting
One of my all time favourite people is Juliette de Baracli Levy, pictured below the spider web as a young shepherdess, she would almost certainly be head of the table at my fantasy dinner party. Our cat hasn't been well so yesterday I was re-reading her Herbal Handbook for the Dog and Cat, where she describes how clean spider webs can be used to mend gaping wounds because of their adhesive qualities...
... her enthusiasm for the healing power of plants just dances off every page...it's contagious.......
"The medicines in herbs are derived from the cosmic forces of sunlight, moonlight, and starlight; from rain and dew and the minerals of the earth's soil layers, as well as hereditary properties. Any herb can have it's medicinal properties analysed to a certain extent; only the cosmic and the hereditary cannot as yet be measured, which is unfortunate, for it is in this 'streaming spirit' of the herb that most of the healing powers are contained."
If you're interested in learning more about this amazing woman and her extroidinary life there is a wonderful film of her on DVD called 'Juliette of the Herbs'
... more magic from nature......I've never seen fireflies, only Glow-worms.....I really hope one day I do, the photos below were from Anthology Magazine blog and they were taken in Japan.
