Biodiversity
Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: July 2022
As July breaks across the farm the great untidyness takes hold. I live where the green tips of treetops meet across the greenstripe roads. The tangled unmown growth of the roadsides spills across ditches, through ramshackles fences past the field edge and the road. Pinks, purples, reds, blues, yellows. St Johns Wort, Thistle, Wild Raspberry. […]
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Cuckoos, Swallows and the Fear of What Will Be
“You wouldn’t know this” he said. From the cab of his blue tractor. We were in lockdown. The first year. So that is where he talked to me from. From the cab to the ground 2 metres. A Social and Agricultural distance. He had reversed the tractor back down the road to talk. “This is […]
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Hawthorn Hill Farm Natury Diary: April 22
We wait. For the curve of a calf beneath it’s mother. For the nicker of a lamb behind the arching care of it’s mother. We wait for Swallow come and Cuckoo call. We wait for things to have be as they always have been.
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Hawthorn Hill Farm Nature Diary: July 2021
The air shimmers with swallows and insects. The birds trace a path above me as my passing sends up insects for their hunt. The ash and sycamore trees creak
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The birds and the bees: Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary 01
I have time, in recovery. From a minor surgery. Nothing major. Nothing threatening. Just. Enough. To slow. Me. Down.
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A mornings work and pine martens.
It is morning on the farm. Feeding time. Crows break from the treetops in an awkward clutter as I rattle my feed bucket on our lane. There is a raven amongst them. Fiach Dubh, the Black Hunter. I can tell by the sound. Their long flight feathers beat the skin of the air like a […]
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Messy by nature
There are farms with lines of white stones that pick out the borders of perfectly crisp lawns. Striped. Formal and formed. There are farms with trim hedges that behave themselves. Rectangular boxes of clean green lines that picture frame their fields. There are farms with fields of ryegrass and clover, uncluttered by wildflowers or weeds. […]
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