windfall walnuts

and another morsel of February project

I am slowly establishing a garden within nine minutes brisk walk of the sea. The views are magical, and things seem to grow rather more cheerfully than they do back on the farm. The coastal climate is gentler (though the winds are much the same at home) and I hope very much to be able to build a one-person house here, that is mostly studio and library space, but has a sheltered balcony nook for quiet cups of tea and the observation of the garden from above. Given the state of the world it is a luxury even to be able to dream of creating a place in which I might comfortably spend my “twiglight” years and be relatively self-sufficient when my family decides I’m no longer safe to allow out on the roads…and who knows, maybe Netanyahu (or Trump) will have blown us all to perdition by then. The former has certainly promised to do so if anyone attempts to restrain Israel from engulfing and devouring its neighbours, and the latter is basically pudding between the ears so who knows when the mad fancy to try out the Big Red Button will take him.

For now, I ponder, plot and plant.

I strewed sunflower seeds there in spring, hoping for some cheery flowers to improve the view for the kindly neighbours who overlook my garden from the higher-up house next door. The seeds were picked out from the chook food, so nothing special. They germinated brilliantly, unlike the seeds of the not inexpensive ‘Hopi’ black sunflowers, which haven’t so much as squeaked since I extracted them from their envelope and interred them.

They flowered beautifully and to nobody’s surprise, attracted the attention of other neighbours.

Once they had decimated the sunflowers, they turned their attention to my neighbours’ walnuts.

Quite a few of which ended up slightly the worse for wear on my side of the fence.

So I thought I might as well gather them up.

I took them home and bundled them into a shawl. My mokos helped. Some of the filming is a bit ‘off piste’, and the sound comes and goes. I’m not Jane Campion.

Unfortunately I completely forgot to take a proper photo of the finished object before I gave it away, but at least there’s a glimpse at the end of the video. The remarkable thing about walnuts is that they offer so many colours. If bound firmly enough, they’ll print green and gold, but if boiled they become chocolate sauce. In an iron kettle the brew will be black. In a copper pot, a much warmer brown. Back in the 1800s brews from these nuts were often used to cover up strands of grey hair.

My kind neighbour was rather chuffed by what walnuts can do (on cloth rather than hair), and gathered up two more big bagfuls on her side. I feel a batch of ink coming on.

I remember teaching a workshop in Cleveland, Ohio a dozen or so years ago where we had an abundance of walnuts, re-using them until they became mush, printing first green, then gold, then brown, mostly on scraps of silk. Sadly I cannot seem to find a single image from that time.

And now to our February project…