In the Teapot & Out the Window- June

A seasonal instalment on the wild magic happening around Hazel Cottage

Jun 21, 2024

It is six in the morning here. Time to get the kettle whistling and the curtains open. The wrens have already been singing loudly since sun up, and I am probably the last creature in the woods to wake and start the day. In the teapot today go rose petals, gathered from around the hut after they were scattered by yesterday’s wind and rain.

There out of the window are two baby wrens! Sitting on the higgledy-piggledy fence around the hut’s garden, half hidden by the large green coins of hazel leaves. The fledglings shuffle about beside each other, staying close as though still inside the confines of a nest rather than out in the big world. Wide-beaked and fidgety, the are puffed up with downy fluff, but when they open their tiny wings they show fully formed feathers, already decorated with the wren’s salt-and-pepper speckles. One fledgling drops to the ground, and I am poised to rush outside and give it a hand back to safety - but it scurries up the wonky fencepost again to sit beside its sibling, quick as a mouse.

Speaking of mice, I saw something especially delightful this week: a mouse at the top of a common hogweed stem, nibbling off the flower buds for supper. After I had taken this photograph, I watched him climb down the stem with the floret in his mouth.

The world is awash with green and is lush from yesterday’s rain; bright buttons of buttercup scattered through a merry tangle of wild grass and ‘weeds’. Open palmed, the trees and plants receive the sunlight of the longest summer day. Tiny apples that are forming on the apple tree have begun to blush skywards.

The foxgloves are so present this year! So very tall; some taller than me. The tapering arrangement of the flowers puts me in mind of wizards’ hats. And what with a number of the plants being human-height, it is as though the garden is populated with purple-hatted wizards, their furred-palms open to reveal the greatest magic trick of all; turning sunlight into flowers and food for the bees. An intrepid bumbler disappears inside one of the purple thimbles. These wizards also know the secret to slowing the human heart, wisdom that can be both healing in the form of digoxin, or dangerous if the leaves are imbibed accidentally (I learnt about the eerie effects of this from a man in the local bakery, but that is another story.)

Wrens sing and sing, and there on the apple tree is a familiar robin; the one who sometimes comes inside the hut through a very small gap in the window (a few weeks ago I found him perched on top of the kettle at 5 am. I have a photo of that somewhere- I’ll include it in my next correspondence).

These animals have become my kin; the birds who sing their hearts out from perches in all directions; the hedgehog who snuffles behind the compost bin; the badgers who dig up pig nuts from the wild meadow around the hut in the night; the toads who hibernate around the garden boundary over winter (I discovered three toads when planting some new hawthorn saplings, which seemed like a very good sign in terms of boundary magic. The toads were gently returned to their underground beds.)

Almost time to end this letter and head out for a wander. The rose tea is delicious. It conjures memories of summer’s past; washing the soil from my younger hands with rose scented soap; holding the soft hands of an elder who loved her garden. As well as a gentle holding, rose can also sometimes bring nostalgia, or sadness. Do you have roses in your garden? If so, what does the smell evoke for you?