Timeless sense from Lilias

Yoga and music - days of deep thought and wild flower hunts down at Mother's Garden with Martin Kirby

How beautiful is this?

The view of the creamy dawn lighting the face of our tatty farmhouse, taking the eye to the lines of lush vineyard beyond the fig tree, always steadies the helm and my heart.
It is, in essence, why we are here. It greets me as I wander up our bumpy track from letting the chickens out of the coop, my head full of all manner of things, not least the old devils of money and a maddening world. Everything at Mother's Garden is making haste, thirsts quenched, growing like topsy as the temperature and vine shoots curve to the sky.
The scent of elderflower is on the western wind, the lizards legs are a blur as they scurry across hot roads, tiny snails scale the smooth trunks of the young mulburry trees in search of new leaf and everywhere life is burgeoning after the rain.
The male collared doves are doing the bobbing dance of love on the track to the farm and every morning there is a tap tap tap at several windows as at least one ardent wagtail picks an argument with his reflection.
May is the month, and my eyes are everywhere, inspired in part by the blossoming and also by the words we are reading. It is our happy habit on a weekend to open the bedroom window to let any dawn breeze tease the lace curtain, to make tea and to read to one another.
We have tried all sorts of literature, but 1940s and 50s nature writers like American Donald Culross Peattie and East Anglians Ted Ellis, Lilias Rider Haggard and their ilk are our firm favourites because their books are wisdom and wonder rolled into one. They uplift us.
About a month ago I went back to my bookshelf and my hands reached for Lilias, this time the third of her Faber and Faber volumes, A Country Scrapbook. These are words that, for the most part, were written in the darkest hours of the second world war when Britain faced invasion.
Lilias was the daughter of Sir Henry Rider Haggard who was best known for his African adventure novels, notably King Solomon's Mines and She. Lilias's gift is for fact not fiction, and her genius is to weave her wonder of nature with greater truths, to lead the reader into an abandoned orchard locked with brambles and there to feel the chill and sense how and why "the tight-cupped pink-tipped apple blossom seems loth to open on to an unkind world". It is a rare and precious record from that time, written down close to where I grew up on the east coast.
The comfort of nature at a time of such peril is palpable. And Lilias reminds us of what 19th century naturalist Richard Jefferies so wisely said, calling on his fellow men to look and live in the beauty of natural things -"The longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable time. This is real life, all else is illusion or more."
That was written more than a hundred years ago. How more relevant it grows. Bear with me, though, for Lilias can match this. She writes with timeless wisdom "We, as well as those we call our enemies, have lost our arcady, and life for many has become mere endurance. We held that it was impossible that men and women should be content to live from the cradle to the grave amidst the simple things of a natural life.
We were bewitched by the gods of speed and luxury..." So off we went last week, high into the Catalan mountains to wander and look, at our feet more than the fading mountain ranges layered into the distance, for we were absorbed with the oh-so-delicate wild flowers decorating the rocky landscape. Unlike the shy birds which my failing eyes strain to follow, the flowers politely wait for us, though I confess I am equally at a loss to identify many of them.
I took photographs with the intention of seeking answers, either from you or a book, but it truly doesn't matter. It is enough to study their beauty and all life that lives among them. One rock rose was home to a small but aggressive black and red-bodied spider, while on the next flower a green Spanish fly, misnamed for it is a beetle and a rather unpleasant one at that, was trying not be be noticed. It needn't have worried. Its age-old aphrodisiac reputation is far outweighed by its toxic truth.
Then, as we stood on a rocky outcrop, a battered swallowtail butterfly, missing a significant part of its left wing, persisted in settling on a stone by our feet, only to be chased away by a far smaller grumpy fritillary. Why, we couldn't figure. There appeared nothing to be had.
But the birds were not to be outdone. As we returned home from another outing with the children Joe Joe spied something moving high in the dusk. We all peered at the most extraordinary spectacle. Not one but 21 of what I am fairly sure were honey buzzards, fast gliding north on migration, wings slightly forward, scattered across the sky.
I have only seen this once before, roughly the same time of year in 2002, close to the farm, with a great number soaring effortlessly, riding a thermal before gliding away without a flap of the wing. It was not so long ago, though, about a month, that I last saw so many birds of prey at once.
That was in England, heading out of London towards Oxford to deliver olive oil during a three-day spin, when I pulled over and stood, stunned, looking up.

It seems that in the relatively short time since we moved to Catalonia at the birth of the new millenium the red kite has filled the skies. I watched 12 in one go, then lost count during the rest of the journey. Is it like that in Yorkshire?
People come and go, as is the way of life here, and we are awaiting a visit in June from a family of Yorkshire Post readers. Sometimes, though, travellers arrive from here from a littler further afield.. One recent Sunday Maggie cooked for 17 - a vegetable curry prepared with the greatest care - and we sat beneath the trees and tried in what little time we had to gleen the stories of the gathering.
Jurgen, our international cellist friend from Holland, now living not so far from us with his Columbian wife Claudia and their two young children, had called during the week and asked that we may offer food and a moment of peace and space for an Indian yoga swami and his pupils on their tour of Europe.
Jurgen and Claudia are also yoga teachers and are lights in our lives. He will, more often than not, bring one of his cellos and play for us, and he did so again before we waved Swami Maheshananda and his young friends on their way.
With the swami was a woman from northern China who rose from the table in the shade of the walnut tree and took our breath away with her singing. Other companions were from Australia, England, Spain and Catalonia, and in all we figured there were people from eight countries at Mother's Garden in that wonderful moment.
Now we must turn our minds back to work as the season begins in earnest with the holiday cottage and we look to dispatch more fresh olive oil direct to our growing list of customers. Maybe, just maybe, I will run some literary courses here this autumn and next spring as suggested by a few people.
We shall see. There seems to be some interest. My writing, meanwhile, trundles along and another book is almost finished. And there is the village fair to think about, just days away and a chance to make a little money, selling Maggie's elderflower cordial and my Catalan book. There is unfinished business, too, in the old farmhouse kitchen.
When we first moved in that bitterly cold January 2001, the not so large east room with it's broken stone floor and open fireplace became our sanctuary.
The children washed in a plastic tub before the fire, while we cooked on a two ring gas hob close to the old sink. A table was somehow wedged into the corner and from there we took stock and made our plans for house and farm. But for too long now it has been lost beneath so many things, a boot room, a box room, a dumping ground, a sad sight to sink the spirits.
So out with everything, and in one week with my brother-in-law Philip at our side we have managed, finally, to rewire it, to fill the spaces between the beams with plaster board and to install a window looking out on to the vineyard.
It will be a sort of grown ups' room - an office corner and a fireside sanctuary with, hopefully, two armchairs and a new bookcase into which can pour the volumes that we brought from England and which have still to escape the crates in the loft. Once the room is plastered, painted and furnished, which will take another few weeks of focus (not my strong point) the next problem will be what to do with the boots, boxes and paraphernalia which haven't quite made it to the rubbish tip yet and wait in piles outside the back door to be sorted.
Ha ha. The barn beckons....
Two final crumbs of news.
If you thought the acoustics in your bath were good, you should hear them in our old balsa. (A balsa is an irrigation reservoir, to be found on virtually all of the small patchwork farms).
The roof is now on the defunct balsa by the holiday house hence creating a rather lovely but unfinished garden room where Jurgen played for us, inspiring talk of afternoon tea concerts to be called Bach in the Balsa. Maggie's happiness was something to see.
My delight, on the other hand, has been in talking to myself. While chatting to a literary agent in London she suddenly said she knew all about me. How, I asked. "I've just googled you," she replied.
So afterwards I googled myself, and discovered I was a senior executive with an international marketing firm called Bos Global. So I emailed myself and we had a nice chat.
Then I discovered I'm a member of the York Athletics Club and did a rather fine job covering the Esholt 5 k in 17 minutes 5 seconds while somehow at the same time taking up a new job and bringing nearly 20 years sales experience to Westbrook Technology, Los Angeles. All this and fitting in time to be a student advisor on the Science and Technology Policy Research Team at the University of Sussex while passing myself off as a rather youthful and successful member of Essex University Jitsu Club.
There were five more of me, so to speak, on the first two Martin Kirby google pages. Blummin' marvellous. We could do with a few extra pairs of hands.
PS If you are reading this Martin Kirby, Yorkshire roadrunner, well done mate.
Martin Kirby’s book No Going Back, Journey to Mother’s Garden, is published by Time Warner :- see the book link below

If you want to know more about living on the (beautiful) edge here in Catalonia, click on the holidays button below.

Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy by Martin Kirby is
published by Pegasus, 8.99 (ISBN 9781903490297)
Website - www.mothersgarden.org