There is a lot of lore around Yew trees, but I can assure you that it’s mostly mistaken, only ever part-right, the consequence of the world seen through half-opened eyes. The only thing the lore makers have gotten right, is that Yew lore is different from the lore of other trees. All tree species have their specific magic, power, and meaning. People who are much more learned than I will tell you that Yews are associated with death and rebirth, and therefore eternity. They will tell you that Yews represent timelessness and the intelligence of the night. The Yew, they say, protects us against evil, which it very well might, but only through its true function. The Yew is associated with death for two reasons: because it is toxic, and because it makes a remarkable longbow. However if you follow time’s arrow, you will find a very different meaning for the
When I turned vegetarian at aged 13, it was due to making the connection between the sweet lambs I would help bottle feed on my dad’s friend’s farm, and the (delicious) lamb chop on my plate. I decided that I didn’t want to kill an animal if I could survive without eating them. I remained vegetarian for over twenty years until it became clear that eating that way was compromising my health. I was originally only going to add in fish to my diet, but I went to Uzbekistan shortly after ending my vegetarianism and was confronted with a (delicious) lamb kebab and that was the end of pescatarian me. Despite realising that I needed to eat meat to be healthy, the ethics around meat eating have not left me. This is why I refuse to buy cheap meat: not only for my health (no thanks to all those antibiotics and Omega
This is what my garden looked like when I moved in a couple of years ago. It had recently been cleared of brambles, and had been the foxes home as no one had used it for years. One of the first things I did was buy a potting shed as I just really, really wanted a shed of my own. My original plan was to have a small patio in front of the shed and some kind of ‘cottage garden’ with native pollinator and bird friendly plants at the other end. I even went so far as to find a load of terracotta paving slabs for free and stacked them up in a corner ready for getting around to laying a patio. Yeah, that never happened. As I have said before, I just couldn’t quite muster the enthusiasm to do much of anything with the space for the first year and
I used to think that there was nothing that I wanted to be when I grow up, hence the lack of meaningful work. However, I have realised that is not quite accurate. It is not that I did not know what I wanted to be when I grow up, it is more that since what I wanted to be seemed unfeasible, I resigned myself to a life of meaningless work. That resignation was so long ago now, that I forgot there was any desire there before it. Well, no more! I have remembered. 😎 My beautiful, shoebox of light came with a fairly large garden (given the size of the flat). It was pretty much derelict when I moved in 1.5 years ago; one of the first things I did was put up a potting shed, because adults with gardens have sheds. Fact. I transplanted a few of the plants I had grown
I was about 4 when this picture was taken. The point of it is not to showcase the lovely smocked dress my mum made for me, but to evidence the ‘vanishing wildlife’ poster behind me. I have always cared about the environment. I have no idea why, but I simply cared from a very young age and was a child member of the WWF and so forth. This environmentalism, and yearly farm visits to feed the lambs, led to me being a vegetarian for over twenty years. It meant I stopped using plastic bags about a decade before there was a push for this. It meant I bought recycled products in the 1980s, and later did my own recycling long before it became normal to do so. In fact, I can remember being in my early teens and pontificating that the only recycled product I wouldn’t use was toilet paper. Quite