A while back, in autumn, a storm blew in earlier than I anticipated, probably because I hadn’t paid quite enough attention to the forecast. I was out in a small wood nearby, one largely surrounded by open fields and bog land and the trees hadn’t yet shed all of their leaves. The wind piled through…
Category: Trees
Yew, the Tree of Artefacts
I have literally just stopped myself running down yet another rabbit hole of related things because “it might be important and I have to try to give a complete picture.” Nope, I don’t. In fact I physically can’t, there is far too much for one modest little, madly meandering blog post. So I have hauled…
Seeking a muse in an oak tree.
I’ve been meaning to return to the subject of the Oak, specifically notes on the notion of an oak in Irish culture, our beloved Dair, first and foremost of the airig fedo, protected to the maximum extent of Brehon law (as documented in the Bretha Comaithchesa). I have no ability with medieval Irish, alas, so…
Wanderings
It was an odd day, but it got a lot better. There are some days when thoughts that ordinarily trickle through the humdrum domestic suddenly swell, careen, scour all before them down new paths thrown open with reckless abandon. Rather than give the torrents all their own way, and especially given an unexpected reason to…
St. Melruaen’s Tree
For reasons I will come back to shortly I’ve been looking for a fruiting walnut tree in Ireland for a while now. Ireland apparently can quite happily support them but they’re not common here at all, and certainly not native. I only found out very recently that the familiar brown nut actually grows encased in…
Be friends with the night, there is nothing to fear
If Dendrophobia is the fear of trees and Nyctohylophobia the fear of wooded areas at night it might be supposed that Dendrophilia and Nyctohylophilia are the love of trees and the love of forests at night respectively. My favourite time of the day is evening, heading for twilight. There is that sense of the world gathering…
Oaks of Charleville Forest
There has always been a tree in my life I considered *my* tree. My very earliest memory is of a swing, a plastic yellow swing seat tied with heavy-knotted rope onto an old but sturdy fruit tree. It is a dense sensory memory, full of prolific leaf on gnarly branch, lush grass and yellow, and…
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