Franciscan farming – some options to explore

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

The website <lichenfoxie> has been quiet in recent months. The authors and writer are gradually getting extraordinarily enthusiastic about local biodiversity documentation. The concept known as a sessile plant florula is in essence of what is being made – This is a kind of local flora, that Declan Doogue, who is struggling for decades with a ‘Kildare Flora’ and John Feehan, Wild Flowers of Offaly would be proud of, that incorporates multiple taxonomic insights derived from the species present. Also <lichenfoxie> has become very enthused about sharing our passion for what I call ‘moth-farming in North Leitrim’ or ‘Sorting Sphagnum …’  developing in the evening, some of the scented paths with Rosa agrestris to and from New Ross, necessary for the urgent transition from Benedictine agriculture to Franciscan farming.

A start at Franciscan farming has been made: in South Kerry, in fields that never heard a Hymac’s engine running in it, forever, or a bill-hook or slaine in the pairc, since 2000; in North Leitrim; at Rossinver in Straid (Connolly); and Kiltyclogher in Corracloona; in West Cork, Bantry at Ardnagashel; in Wexford near New Ross, at Ballyanne; in Carlow, on the hill slopes with a reddish Scapania cf. irrigua, near Ballymurphy and the tree trail of Myshall with an amazing Bay tree in the Adelaide Church grounds. In Wicklow, we have recently been looking at a mine adit at Glendalough; a boulder in the block scree near the Miner’s Village in Wicklow. Florulas of these places are in gestation.  

The production of a short concise local florula that documents sessile biodiversity by <lichenfoxie> continues apace – a florula as we mention above is a booklet about the biodiversity of a particular place and the assemblages of plants, ferns, mosses, liverworts, fungi and lichens, algae, and any other groups of wildlife that there is evidence for, observed directly in a day or twos observation at a place in a townland in some county in Ireland, in Soufriere in Saint Lucia or on a French Polynesian island in the South Pacific ocean like Moorea.   

The South part of County of Kerry, between Kenmare and Sneem, is in the heart of Thomas Taylor (1785-1848) country. As I write on www.lichenfoxie.com, we draw attention to the ground work on Thomas Taylor scholarship has been set by the late Geneva Sayre late of the Farlow Herbarium, Harvard University Herbaria. This material has the potential for making of an historical florula in the landscape of South Kerry between 1800 and 1850.

On pesticides, there is a school project from 1983, researched in the Oakpark Library, which I can go back to, which was supervised by Dr. Andre Fro:lich. The impact of agriculture from the mid-1980s to the 2020s on the Irish landscape and its florulas has been profound. The changes in the weeds of tillage crops from the 1970s, on, have been extraordinary. We can see this by looking closely at the Flora of Carlow, by Evelyn Booth, and the bryophytes of Arable Fields in Kildare.  

In the mid-2010s, in what is now DCU Alpha, we with Sean O’Donovan studied the botany of twigs from Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth as well as the botany of Saint Lucia in 2014, and we would like to draw stands of our writings for local botany together. This approach to documenting nature, focused on making a florula of sessile plants, and the biodiversity side of nature, was crystallised in teaching, that Maria Cullen and I gave on Culture Night at the convent at Glasnevin. We are now feeling centred on a path to the future realism of Franciscan ‘moth’ farming, versus the Benedictine dairying of today.

A few weeks of new writing in Summer and Autumn 2022 with attention to responding to the contents of the 100 display books and conferring with earlier writings on <www.lichenfoxie.com>; much of which you our dear readers have read; has left us with an interesting raft of ideas to put into second gear. Second gear is a Finnish Ascomycete Systematics scientist’s analogy, Seppo Huhtinen, we are doing an #agriculture by applying ourselves to themes in a Venn diagram somewhere between ethical agronomy and wise mushroom carpophore utility for the #future.

We had a great session at The Organic Centre, Rossinver, County Leitrim on Saturday 11th June 2022, performing at Foley Falls, and again over three days at our Irish Geological Association granite geobiology workshop with Maria Cullen in Glendalough, Wicklow Mountains National Park, 17th to 19th June 2022. Go, #gratitude. Many thanks to Mary & Johnnie Cullen of Ballyanne, Nick and Sophia Hilliard of Corracloona, and Christy & Johnny Fanning of Loughshinny, the Andrews of Fournoughts; and Sr. Vivienne Keely, Margaret Aylward Centre Faith Dialogue, and Heinrich & Greta Pertl, Glasnevin, and other good people who have provided the benevolent community spaces for us into which such notions of sessile Franciscan ‘moth’ farming has developed, during the life of Oberon (gebornen: xii 2011) and Bran.

This contribution to organisation of our few decades of floristic botany and field geology in Ireland, and in a few choice places around the world, into a series of locally relevant floristic outputs will be a benefit to anyone considering Franciscan ‘moth’ farming and native ‘sessile’ gardening on their patches, to help readers understand what different kinds of plants are present, and how the biodiversity that you have on site provides a framework for the resident entomology, as our resource for providing options to farmers interested in this style of ‘moth’ farming.

Should you be a landowner with a budget to spend, do feel free to enquire, and commission us to do our magic, and document your site. We are just an e-mail away. For all our FB friends, this is the essential service, of sessile plant florula making, that we are endeavouring to provide from our office with a Rising Tide in New Ross.

With kind regards

Howard Fox

Botanist & Writer, a.k.a. <lichenfoxie>

Maria Cullen

C.E.O., Planet Life Research

Rising Tide

36 South Street

New Ross

County Wexford

1010 words

CONVERSATION DESIGN

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

We looked ahead and saw two people.

She said “We met them before”

“What did I say to them last time?”

She reminded me that I had said nothing.

As they drew closer, I felt ready and rushed through my thoughts for an opening gambit. We had been walking and talking all afternoon since before we got to Clancy’s and now we were almost back.

My eyesight been poor in reading glasses, they gradually became discernible 30 yards of as the people whose son we had met turning up the steps on the Corracloona link, as an exerciser, who has apologetically run behind, and then darted past between us as we had blocked his path, like two bullocks on their way to the mart at Arney who had bizarrely slipped up a side lane back into some field or other between Swanlinbar and Arney in the Fermanagh North Leitrim glens fog.

You have to be quick, like a Leitrim hurler, whom you read about in the paper.

They were 20 yards out and I boomed in the friendliest tone I could muster:

“Good Afternoon”, ralentandoing it to be in synchrony with the gaps between their footsteps.

“It is a wonderful day.”

They had a dog they were struggling to bring under control. I focussed on the dog breed…

“Do you know that the dog that John Steinbeck from California in Travels with Charlie was a poodle? Your dog, what is his name?…

I chanced the genderized pronoun. With poodleish dogs, they are so curly, it is hard to tell.

Two chances and the conversation design fails. They slowed like us to a standstill.

She struggled to recall the name of her dog that he had on its lead.

We learned it was in fact her daughters dog Chloe, a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle.

She was a dote. She became a handful biting at the lead. I picked up on his epithet, not shedding, a euphemism suggesting that the dog does not moult and leave dog hair everywhere. He must have a perfectly clean house. You have to be quick like in Hurling, as in conversational design. I started again.

“Mickey Rooney in an Arabian film in 1978 had a carpet he went flying on, like the carpet on the tiled floor at home in Corracloona with a weft of dog hair on it, which floated off into the air, as if it was from an Afghan hound.

“You like your films… there being a film club in Kilty.

We gradually learned that the daughters were at college and one was doing exams from home. They had internet.

I write and have a webpage lichenfoxie on the word press.

I am fluffing the story telling, not living by Hemingway’s maxim, write what you know, and write it as true as you can possibly make it. Listening, writing, telling a story, remembering is such a busy thing to do all at once while trying to do a themed essay on conversation design, which brings us swiftly back to the people on the walk.

Two film references, and he said… You like your films… He has also said something else but I forget it now, not that I did forget it, but I did not recall it, if you can indulge me.

Writers are a tolerated bunch, reaching out for friendship. He has said lichen pronounced in the formal way, whereas I has said lichen in the uncouth way. Being a lichen themed conversationalist, if all else fails I flailed around looking for the nearest tree for a specimen to demonstrate if the opportunity developed. Here is a Graphis scripta if necessary, visually saved. Lichen, like as living with mosses on a tree.

“You must be an engineer…

She would have opened up with a reply but I fluffed it again… not leaving enough room for silence… You must be an engineer …

I wish I had said in my best diplomatic French, I was so rude. I did not answer, I talked over your entrance to your riposte to my reply. It all got very confusing…

Good writing is like good listening, picking up with an opening question on the word that was left dangling … lichen… dog hair… engineer… Blacklion… Holey Soles, the walking group… the glens… an encyclopaedia of the area… so full of knowledge, but slow to release it, one grain of sand at a time. Slow is an understatement, like the Black River delta, dropping one grain of sand at a time on the delta… while there is swift water flowing over the Ballyshannon dam weir at Belleek.

The inquisitive nature of mine has been satisfied by meeting Kevin’s plant friend earlier before getting to Clancy’s to get internet. The Leitrim glens writers write about themselves and their neighbours… There are so many glens, and so many Glen writers, that an essay on conversation design is precisely what is needed, and like any good guru… start with a few tips.

Conjecture on the side of absurdity… Really listen… Speak slowly… Really leave gaps… lots of them… so many in fact that other people help you fill them in, unlike the potholes. There is not even one at the end of the path up to his house, this putative engineers house. Filled in. I am loosing my touch as a reporter. There were so many conversations today, the bullocks, the rams, the sheep that were loose, the internet, the dog peed ending, and other potential conversation gambits… he must have read lichenfoxie… all the while you could have picked up on anyone of the hurling moves to play long rally tennis conversations with.

You have really arrived in Corracloona a year and a half… She is, a reader is, a long conversationalist… practised on the telephone while walking, you can tell by the breathing pattern in time with the steps sonogram, of a flute player, writers cannot keep up… unlike hurlers… that walk the lanes of Corracloona perchance whom you might meet… labelled on a post box, and strike up a conversation… if the y are in the humour… vary your pace… weather… the trees… a question… arrest them with a question… may I see your licence please… the dogs… no I am not the guard… all over the place… writing, reading, talking, reporting, over-talking not over-taking, drawing people out, winkling like a newsagent from Athy, Winkles, fishing… Fishing skills for beginners.

People are vying to talk. We have a writer, not great, not bad, but a story about a midge, eating you… So now we need a guide to the conversations we are having… confessions make us busy. I could imagine a priest saying that. They do not have anything to do but reach out for a sage metaphor, and they train for seven years, not to utter a put down… about conversation design.

Not that there has been a train to the ballroom since 1950 something. Which brings me to the next conversation… Blacklion… Nevins’s Cistin.  And Ben’s Madrid waiting… and onward to find himself… Handy with livestock he is… That’s the thing Priests train for seven years… and there is the Turin Shroud in the letterbox…

Community is built with people… and conversations… free conversations… not inhibited, controlling ones… conversation design can get in the way, and that only gets you so far… out with it… tonally apposite, before you go running, tonally appropriate conversation gambits.

Conversation is a skill for the quiet ones, that all at once we do at once, and do not practice enough, in our isolation in the glens of North Leitrim. Conversational design, a subsection of a subsection of an article on offences against the person act… My… Trump is good… as a guru… His downfall perhaps… the Hippocratic oath… never do harm… with your utterance… Then you are on the correct path… shining… These ellipses, the three dots are great… my favourite punctuation, after commas, and full stops.

Ellipses an opening to allow you to sing along with an Ed Sheeran song, where if you listen and try to sing along, he leaves no room for conversation… Which is precisely the reason he is so popular, perhaps… And everyone walking with headphones must be listening to, whom are difficult to approach with a booming 20 yard opening, conversationally designed, gambit. Not that I have a tape, download, podcast, or cd of Ed Sheeran songs, apart having heard on the radio a story about a something or other lineman, mid east coast America a bit over out west. Not far from Nashville, Tennessee.

No internet is a luxury, for a writer. We go to Clancy’s or the other way into Kilty to send our e-mails. We share a computer. In the house, I have just a pencil, a quiver of them, ready to write. Corracloona style, Gan Gam. Nom nom, nom. Our organic vegetables survived the frost, as I watched over them, as the vegetables read the small print on the Irish Times, repurposed to protect them from Frost, until the morning came. Reading the Irish Times in their minds eye, plants, each plumule and radicle, frost sensitively reading the headlines, Covid 19 reports, and our reporter here in Corracloona, some cadences from lichenfoxie, like a water flea detective…

Yours sincerely

Is mise.

Lichenfoxie, the uncouth pronunciation.

P.S.

I forgot to type in page 7 from my double-sided 14 page pencil script. Now here we are.

Two mistakes, co-segmentation is a disaster… One slip in my amnesiacal memory is one thing, but over talking and inhibiting conversation is another. The dog who was a handful had stopped being one. Dogs are a great judge of character, like in wanderly wagon.

All this is too frenetic, four people, one dog being playful. You have to be stable and focus on the point of view. Jumping point of view is a disaster. The conversational design was maturing and the itchiness to get home was returning, I could see it.

P.P.S.

In reaction to other conversations, and other local readers, I need to write more, to catch up with our public written lichenfoxie persona. Had I told him about the story about the midges of Corracloona? The story with the overblown militarist reference points, not that I would not be militaristic if I was thinking like a midge and be sorrowful and resentful about all the offences against the midge by bats and their below attic house habitants, with their carbon dioxide machines, sweet as the dioxide of a deer’s breath, that lure them to bog myrtle paths on the slopes of Thur Mountain, where swallows drink the summer raindrops and where along streams we go on the hunt for sweathouses. Which is so bats, it is the normal state for a North Leitrim glen Buddhist writer, Hippocratic oath, catharsis for the reader2, and all that.

Postcard from the Edge of the Townland

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

This week, I met Brian, the writer.
I would never ever, ever, say this. Your text is past the point of rescue remedy. Complete Trollop’s. Never. Not ever. Always pour forth. You are getting there. I look forward to being a reader of your novel, printed and guillotined out of your mind, by Caesarian section, just in case the Manor Hamilton vet’s scan shows that there are two lambs in her uterus, Romulus and Remus. The Cotswold countryside is full of fecking fleecy sheep, Mr. Murphy.
The classroom, slow to react, was uncertain.
From Manor Hamilton mart, He continued, then sat down.
Is that paragraph good enough to pass your editor’s censorious picque.
Where the feck is the Cotswolds, again. The flautist piped up.
Let us pull out the map of Sasanach, and draw your fecking sheep on it, not on mine, your map, your hand drawn map, his teacher replied. Our understanding of their geography comes from the radio, the Cotswolds is silly mid-off when bowling from the Manchester end, wearing a woolly jumper on a scorching hot day. Overheated, he starts his run up at Hadrian’s wall. He is out, caught, by a snick to the first Cotswold. Mr Murphy the Irish Newsreader, is new to cricket commentating. He must have been left handed.
Republican lessons were going down a treat in the Corracloon School.
Brian had gone visiting over the weekend and had a new ally, receiving a book from an Alternative Ulster library on fungal taxonomy, the science of classification and the identification of the species from far flung country-sides from the Cotswolds to Barbuda.
The title of the fecking book, in a series of monographs on Humour Research had the bizarrely inappropriate title – A sence of humour. A thesis, read only once, by the poor author, so full of typos, which is so fecking funny, you cannot believe, I am serious, but I am.
Oberon, what is the problem. He is training to be the next dog in space.
Corracloona, we have a problem.
Oberon wants to go out for a space-walk.
Do not bother Mary or us.
Taxonomy is the great extinguisher of mirth, the next class, Mr. Murphy, thought ahead, almost for the first time in his life. Planning, scheming always, but thinking ahead. Never. In that stubborn, Ulster, blackberry bath of grey mould of a way, in a Penicillin prescription voice, that brings me on to Manor Hamilton, later on in the morning to return Library books, from that foetid stew that is his mind.
This week, I met Brian.
The bowl on his space ship is low in water and out of carrots, except there is a half, actually a smidgin less than a quarter of a carrot, still in his bowl, but there is no kibble.
I think we are getting there, closer to Corracloon.
The hermitage’s bedroom door is open. He puts his hand out and closes it.
The extraordinary happens.
Oberon pants vigorously after the aerobic exercise of barking continuously, while being ignored. Unlike Bran, he eats carrots quietly, in between barking.
He knows the story is not funny, and he is exhausted barking at me for offenses against the state of Oberon act. I read to him in my Richard Burton voice, as if it were Under Milk Wood. He sits by my side like a Manxian Panda, black and white with three and a half legs, settled, his gavel meeting out justice in camera in hermetic chambers. Oberon’s skill in justice extends to salami, which he found in a box of taxonomic collections left down to dry from Belmont’s picnic on Friday.
It is Monday. He looks to me to have the recess terminated, sitting, repositioned, back to the door.
‘Vivid Vivienne’s baskets from vimnalis in Vermont require Vermouth to soothe, explaining the benefit of the republic to the citizens of The States’ Mr. Murphy said. ‘The making of basket cases is our next class in Corracloon, Mr. Murphy continues. A class in home economics for your formation. ‘And Snowberry by the school yard grows native in Virginia, Symphytocarpus virginiana, continuing his taxonomy lesson, totally invasive, and unsuitable for making of baskets, but wreaths at Christmas perhaps, when it Snows on Killymanjaro.
Found your inner voice yet, Sir.
That is not funny.
Oberon, gnaws and licks in an attempt to soothe the itch of his underbelly mange, back to the door.
This week, I met Brian.
He is actually a writer. So much so, when he retired after his parents died and he bought an abandoned republican National School in Corracloon, to write in.

Corracloona,
Tuesday

Dear Brian,
Thank you for your hospitality in Corracloon on Saturday, and I trust you enjoyed your visit to our wee monastic hermitage in Corracloona by return, where our dogs eat carrots. Hope your dogs are well, especially the epileptic one. We enjoyed the homemade flapjacks and the black Earl Grey tea. Maria sends her Aubergine recipe from Manor Hamilton library.
Learning from you,
Regards,

Mr. Murphy.

800-850 words.

Oberon sounds suitable for the Angelus

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

He goes in the rushes. When he is done, he bursts through the tussocks, rustling back onto the path.
Come on, Obi!
He gets to the door first.
I look in the window passing, see Oberon up on the bed already, walk to the door and shutting it, the door clips home.
Oberon is now drinking in his room, lapping, a sound track suitable for the Angelus. He moved on and is now settled behind the kitchen door. His chin is on a floor mat, watching.
Five books are to go back to the Library, in the morning, to Manor Hamilton. They are laid out on the bed.
I cough and splutter. Moving, I sit on the bedside to continue writing.
Oberon repositions himself on the Leaba, watching the kitchen door, in more comfort.
I turn in, too, shedding my slippers, which might irritate him, into action.
Oberon resumes his watch, noticing my feet. He picks at the kibble spilled from the bed bound dish.
He looks over at Patricia Fitzgerald’s 2004 book From Pictures to Words, a guide to books for children, by a County Clare Librarian.
Oberon is wondering when Howard would write and illustrate a book to read to dogs at bedtime, especially for him.
He growls, now, as I type up this.
He gnaws at the duvet, grooming the sheets, a pelt satisfyingly mange free. He noses and tips the bowl and then, nose in, selects another kibble, with a deft sweep of his tongue.
My arm is like that of a right-handed swimmer, with the muscle on the back forearm, tightening with each progressing sentence.
Oberon sits. His ears follow the sound of the story on the radio, and the rubbing of my toes and feet together. Socks hang from the radiator.
Oberon descends from his perch, and I check on him, disturbing him in the process. He is nosing around my shoes and socks. He lies flat out on the tiled floor. He rises, checking on Maria sounds, emanating from the kitchen – pots moving between berths on the cooker’s ceramic rings.
Howard remembered that Mary said Jose called her a good cooker. Jose was a kid, brought over by a Spanish priest, who came to stay in Ballyanne. The priest of Rathgarogue, Father Frank had arranged for a Spanish exchange in the parish, and one of the kids in the group to stay with her, and be on his best behaviour, with his most trusted parishioner, Mary. In his gratitude, Hose’s innate Spanish humour, attempting to speak polite English, lives on in Mary’s mind.
Michael Murphy, the newsreader, another Spanish exile, writes poetry of emulating voices for the Beeb Four, with select vocabulary of perfectly pronounced language of Joanna Trollope, one could never find on Irish Radio at Montrose.
‘A Country Girl’ starts on the radio. Ah, the stage Irish …
Oberon began to breathe more regularly and dozes off. The radio reception tuning here North of Manor Hamilton leaves a lot to be desired, contrasted with kettle boiling noises … as the water temperature, and the steam pitch rises.
‘Howard’, she calls.
‘Yes’, he responds.
Maria lightly scrapes and thunks on some crockery on the cooker with a fork, as Howard imagines that she is plating up din-dins.
As the Beeb Four radio play proceeds, he ask ‘What is that tune?’
‘The Parting Glass’, she replies.
How interesting! Go on https://www.lichenfoxie.com; do the contemplation required, reflect on the meaning of …
din,
before and after din …
make a composition about din,
in a poetic mode of thought.
He awaits dinner … but cannot write for much longer.
That’s it, time is up. His arm feels that last surge to write.
Come on! She calls …
Coming …, coming …

Aubergines sliced and salted,
dabbed in cream flour,
as batter,
fried on a pan,
chilies for her,
none on his,
serving,
after swabbing in a dish …
of microwaved honey.

‘That’s the amazing thing about a recipe’, from a vegetarian cookbook from the Manor Hamilton Library, she began, ‘is that even if one might not have tried or tasted it before, when making dinner, recipes really work out, best’.
Mary’s daughter, Maria, is a good cooker.
Should we keep the cookbook out for another week, or bring it back, man yana?

736 words

Howard Fox
20th August 2019

Chewing a carrot at bedtime.

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

Dogs bark repeatedly and the sound fades from two farmyards away. A cow’s moo is calling attention to something unknown to me. Birds in the pine trees behind chirp and chirrup. Surrounding sounds are Dolbyesque, as the evening birdsong warbles through the air. A sheep bleats summonsing her lambs in the rushy field with the puncauns of purple moor grass.

A midge alights onto my nose and parades around a classified nostril as if it were a military parade ground, and then, without a salute or a signal, joins the air corps, and is off. The next one is curious about eyebrow hair; air force landing markings, stripes not lost on me either. The lens of my spectacles host another jump jet, as if my lens were a battleship air-craft carrier cruising through the air. My hand is drawn to my face to quell an itch; while a beetle settles on the whiter page, next for my scriptures, and draws in its underwings. Shrone sides washed with eye tear fluid soothes most irritations, except for the earlobes and inter thumb and palm skin. As I am wearing a poly tail, the back of my neck is accessible too, but not frequented by the flying squadrons, delicate hand rubs, over raspy bristle of my filtrum and cheek to chin jowls releases an itch which migrates around my core with perniciously high frequency. Hand signals, skin rubbing, hand clasping, pencil gripping writing aside, my other hand is fully occupied assuaging my forehead, inevitably disturbing stray hairs from my hair band and pony-tailed mop. One alighted up a trouser leg, the irritating bastard, and then a single hair from my head scribbled like a quivering stencil of an electrocardiogram meteing out a pattern below my spectacles on my stiff upper lip. In this Battle of Britain, nostrils, caverns of lubricosity are no deterrent to air-borne raids. My spectacles, with pads perched on my shrone, are rearranged, while the sound of the door closing warns me of the haste of my potential discovery, gallivanting, writing in pleain aeir, in the evening. The sun descends below the last cloud on the skyline, in an incandescent stripe of cadmium yellow, through a canopy of Birch above some yellow irises, green crocodile green, compared with the rushes in the foreground with their Saint Brigid’s cross florets and leaf tussocks like hedgehogs.

Nettles in the foreground too, make for wandering off-line, memorable. Now my supported leg is numb from the immobility of sitting in a captain’s chair composing this. The numb sleepy leg is immune to midges. Meanwhile a new irritation emerges between my big toe and the sandal strap, appealing for a foot massage to bleat it out of its misery. A ewe calls for sundown and her lamb bleats in response. The air squadron is thinning out. A bumble bee flies towards the sunset and irises. Thistles not yet out, and a few days short of blooming profusely, where the bumble bee flew from, he was heading, what is now upwind, as the sky darkens, and the cadmium line is expunged by a darker humid cloud.

Combs are my favourite hand tool. A body shop one graces my sporran. My thumbs and fingers massage my right foot’s toes, tugging at nails, removing stray skin flakes and otherwise soothes my anesthetized foot. Adidas striped pool slippers rest in the sheep-grazed grass, while in my right ear a battalion hisses and wing warps tiny sonic booms.

The skyline of Sitka Spruce holds a marvelous lilac clouds behind, while a droplet sensed, signals the advance of a low cloud from the west. Hairs on my skin, above my tarsals, are tugged by my sandal strap. A bugger has negotiated the boulder choke of the kneecap and joint and is now ensconced under my left hock, provoking a complete rearrangement of me in my chair. My numb foot, my numb butt, the groans of my bamboo chair in my resettling, tarsal squadrons, neck squadrons, hand pencil holding dynamic reactive squadrons clear for take-off. Ley grass with opposite florets with palea, glumes, lemma and short awns, wave in response to disturbance. A middle distance dipteran or micro-moth rises first white, and darkens as the sky becomes its backdrop.


Back at the house, Bran is incapable of chewing a carrot quietly. Meal time noises at a silent monastic refectory are politely tolerated, but Bran takes the biscuit. A midge in my ear never left the hangar, for his evening exercises. This was the last midge that lived before being rolled up into a Lake Victoria, Ugandan pate, what the dog might eat.

Octagonal Lazy Susan

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

An octagonal lazy susan

on the kitchen table

an onyx cheese board

a polished stone tablet

befitting a curved cheese-knife

and crackers and Brie

Milk jug and a lidded sugar bowl

hospital stainless steel urns

decorate it now,

empty,

awaiting a table setter

Howard Fox

13 iii 2023

Canine reverie disturbed

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

A stretch of writers arms

unbidden

disturbed

Victualler’s steel

hanging on the kitchen wall:

A sound of metal filing

of sieves against ladels.

Alarm, enough to

move a canine

to a fit of

yawns and whimpers

and whys

and licks and paws

and company …

The Bawnogues and hibernation habitats

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

Beyond the football club and the primary health centre, there is an ancient horse racecourse track not far from the Motorway boundary. The ground here has knapweed, a signal of old wet grassland. Woody plants include ash, ivy, roses, hawthorn, blackthorn, elder and a stray oak. A hawthorn bush has a full diameter Ramalina farinacea bauble, a bush lichen on a branching shoot. A moss-covered ash trunk has some black cyanolichen in the moss sward. Collema subfurvum is a speculative option for this, but as a scarce species too needs more investigation. The whole area of the Bawnogues, gives the impression of an escapee relict of the 19th century with an occasional broc if you were lucky.

A walk around Kilcock the other day showed a few species doing reasonably well – Physconia distorta on lime – Stictis radiata on an ash and swards of moss and Xanthoria parietina on elder bushes. Some sycamores carry Parmelia sulcata while ash has some Flavoparmeia caperata. In an overall view, many of these species have modest populations on amenity trees planted in the housing estates, while the remaining hedges provide habitats for species to overwinter.

One function of hedgerows is to allow annual species to overwinter. The brutal flaying of hedgerows in winter seems to have lost the overall plot in conservation, as hedgerows are a refuge in Ireland for species that overwinter in the habitat. The law and the hedge cutters seem to have lost sight of the idea that insects lay eggs on leaves, and overwintering leaves provide shelter and warmth for many species in mid-February, where we are at now.

The number of liverworts, mosses, lichens, and macrofungi at the Bawnogues and nearby parts of Kilcock is one of the wonders of biodiversity in what humanity can dismiss as wastelands. We must be very careful with our vocabulary to ensure our message is not corrupted. Litter picking can show that these wastelands have interesting uses by humans. Once February is over, we can proceed with springtime, and it was nice to see by an ash log the emerging leaves of a Primrose plant, Primula vulgaris. Such a wild plant at the Bawnogues, shows the ancientness of this part of Kildare, and perhaps the cyanolichens species of elder and ash moss swards on tree bark need to be added to this list of indicators of ancientness in the Pale of Leinster. Thanks are due to Maria Cullen for accompanying myself and Bran on our walks in Kilcock, and to Ursula King for showing us around some highlights of Kilcock where we could do our botanical magic and provide Latin names for some of the species in the environment here.

Howard Fox

17 ii 2023

Enniscorthy library upstairs… 6 vii 2022

~ howardfox41 ~ 1 Comment

The desk, a table, in the room, is adequate. My knee sides against a leg. The chair, fabric covered, supports my ample weight.

A portrait of Colm Tobin surveys the room, Anthology … the third book down in the slush pile of a writer’s desk. A water bottle would rehydrate a dry throat. The desks here are to be left clear. No unattended belongings whatsoever. David Daly has a ’Reed bunting at Rosslare’ portrait too. I met him at the pumphouse in The Slobs at an exhibition or something, when I was charged with the Wexford Natural Heritage Areas boundary in the county. That brings me back to 1993 or thereabouts, before my writerly ambitions coalesced through the Caribbean Literary Salon days of 2012. Now that I write, I feel much better, life imitates art and one has to forge one’s future word by word.

The barcode of the book on the display was 597298555474111 on the second time round, not that I had read the number fully on the first occasion. What book did the librarian choose, not Irish. Was it ‘shore fauna and flotsam for beachcombers’?

The fire station, next door, has a block tower of red painted doors, never opened, but I would be happy to stand corrected. A lime tree Tilia, one Cedrus atlantica glauca and a dead hulk, Eucalyptus-like, with a nest of ferns, 8m up, Polypodium interjectum is at deep mid-wicket, as I set off from the Hadrian’s Wall end, west of Vinegar Hill, with Saint Sennan’s behind the Slaney bank rocks, below the second ‘new’ Slaney bridge. Setting a tale in Enniscorthy is an honour of the librarians. It is an airy room, with traffic sounds and wind-blown tree crowns flapping in the breeze, leaves flapping restrained in simple harmonic motions, branch sways, of Beaufort five and steady. A collared dove flaps and flies in the lime tree crown, not a reference to the forces, of Vinegar Hill, two-and-a-bit centuries back when we all hoped for mental freedom…

A Rook wipes its beak on the Eucalyptus branch, for want of a more secure tree identification. The rookery calls in the breezes are heard above the traffic noises. They do like their horns in Enniscorthy, not as much as the Neapolitans of Pompeii with their Pizza ovens, Fiat Bambinoes, and Fiat Merafioiris. I need to get comfortable, not to leave bags unattended, so I pack up and get ready to explore downstairs. What I will find remains to be seen. The book trolley in the corner has a book: Slavery, while a child’s voice outside is enthused by being near the Fire Station, the Pompiers of Enniscorthy, Fire engines to me and to you. I must arise and go now to the window to see, if Saint Sennan’s is visible from this space. Not really… but this is: Better World Books Weeding Procedure – June 2021. Change on Sierra, if discarding. In Sierra, change the status to w (withdrawn). Click on supress: yes.

I find cookbooks on the south wall, the novels section with newspapers in a eastern room, a toilet my reason to go downstairs. Afterwards I leave and head off and go to watch a heron wading in the river, from somewhere else, inside. A caddis fly with long curved antennae perched on the hotel promenade window. The caddis was outside. It was not far away. It was silhouetted by a cloudy sky, 8 okta, not a blue azure drop in sight.

Howard FOX

Edited – 22/23 xi 2022

Parsing our vision (a botany film)

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

Be thou our vision o ruler of all

Let us parse nature into scientific words

viewing the botany in woodlands as we walk

let the latin names of plants

be enchanting rounds in our minds

Rehearsals of our vision in that long sense

training our eyes to recognition of species

units of nature with all their repeatability

predictable kinds adjacent in place

commensals in niches and micro-habitats

that one has the botany for all to define

Be thou our vision, parse nature in kind

Making our eyes see your creation divine

beyond beauty let us mesmerize on life

and think of the world from this growing shoot

a meristem

a production of botany conserved and available

spawn to propagate and duplicate and farm

for the moths and us too. Parse our nature streams,

their visual music into stories too. A myth to educate us

to fluency at heart, keep us with our eyesight

our vision to care for us all, until it is time

from this mortal coil to depart.

Be thou our vision, parse it by heart.

Howard Fox, 14 x 2022

Blended Coffee

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

From the kitchen press

I clear half-empty bags

of coffee

into a

clear wide-mouthed Kilner jar

containing a plastic spoon

belly down handle up

Three coffee bags are

crimped in and tied with a

double twist of a hair bob.

Tipped in without a spill

a metal spoon

clatters in

handle impaled into the heap

Something disorganized

wrong way up

unlike her.

Thumb pinched, up and out

de-spooning a jar

before putting away

‘Blended Coffee’

She reads my poems

so I do not know if it is wise to say

before she comes next

and I offer to make her

‘Blended Coffee’

Howard Fox

Readers, Dear reader

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

Today I am writing to readers whom I have accosted in cafes and dug into my wallet, and unbeknownst to them what is happening, I fish out my business card l i c h e n f o x i e, botanist & writer and they politely accept this act of sharing and when they next get a moment on the internet, do a search on lichenfoxie and hey presto, up come a page entitled – Readers, Dear reader …

If you are one of my live recipients of this l i c h e n f o x i e gambit, I must say you are a lively bunch, drinking tea in cafe’s, talking to customers at supermarket checkouts, or anyway being friendly with the courtesy of talking to a stranger about Ireland, people of this cafe, of Mark O’Hara of Markree and the young Percival of Ballisodare, of this Supermarket once, like Michael Harding of somewhere in the southern end of North Leitrim, or Bryan Leyden of the Hawkswell Theatre, or other such random encounters with mirrors, peering out with a friendly face. Garrolous to the last, talkative like a Jay, Garralus glandarius, or some such lating name.

We have to thank Vistaprint for the business cards. I am beginning to run low, which is a sure sign that I have outstayed my welcome. What more can I say. I have recently enjoyed Rosita Boland’s travel memoir book: Elsewhere, which with a envously smart title talks about journeys to darkest Peru, Pakistan, Australia and other adventures of this journalist, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a Poetry Reading of Michael Cronin in Rathgar. Other books I can commend include Standing In Gaps, Seamus O’Rourke’s memoir of a Leitrim adolescense and a Leitrim life. The story I like most is the one I relate frequently, about the chap at the crossroads in North Leitrim smoking a Hamlet cigar. Seamus drove through the crossroads and after about a mile, felt guilty. He turned his car around in a gate and headed back to the crossroads for a chat. Half an hour later, he headed on his way, doing his errands of the day. Did I miss anything, he asked, and I replied: No. So I told Mr Breen after mass in Rathgarogue on Sunday. His sister passed on. She will be missed.

These stories make me think of people, people among us that we have not had the time to be friendly at length with, people with whom we have been aloof, shared a smile, and have been sufficiently self absorbed or tongue tied, not to say much at all. I suppose I am not a great listener, I am rather pushy when it comes to conversation, and some of the one sided monologues you readers, dear reader, read patiently on. Conversation is one of those artforms that needs practice and I despair with those who struggle with the English language in the country of Ireland. I am talking of the Polish or Czech or Swiss people who have read some l i c h e n f o x i e and moved swifty on. Can I say most people have several languages if their English is something they worry about. I have no Arabic, except the botanical Usnea, Ooshnia, or some such word, and they really need not worry about language, as Irish people are generously tolerant of English with a variety of normal and arcane turns of phrase, I suppose the joy of the language is the fluency with which we can send one to the dictionary, unlike Rosita Boland, I never had the pleasure of really taking seriously, apart from the two volume Oxford in ridiculously small print in giant pages of multiple columns. This was supposted to be set on a lecturn and a page opened at random daily, for a rummage, into the depths of the language. I never had the lecturn, but I would be in the market for one if the furniture dealers or furniture makers felt they could market one.

My other task today it to understand the concept of plotting in novel writing. Apparently one has to string together a set of scenes that one remembers from a film – not that I watch films except Afghan rug films with Mickey Rooney and thorny briars of Arabia in 1978 and I dream of dog hair wafting up to Oberon’s nose while he inhales, a snore if you must, dreaming of a long day out in Sligo, more specifically Collooney, in the cafe near the Roundabout, which is halfway between Ballindine near Knock and the Diamond in Donegal. I ordered the last available sausage roll. Oberon our dog has perfect Polish. He rolls over when you instruct him to roly poly. We said this in the veterinarian’s studio in Manorhamilton, and the vets there are Polish. Oberon will be a roly poly if he gets to many Collooney takeout sausages. Which brings me back to plotting. It is sort of making up things, string them together into a story while Oberon barks and grumbles in the background.

Quince paste and cheese on Tuc biscuits awaits.

Kildare Snowdrops II

~ howardfox41 ~ Leave a comment

The tall tree casts its long shadow at dawn in weak sunlight; winter is beginning to ease. Snowdrops catch little of the hint of warmth in still air. Cool but not cold. These Galanthus nivalis could be from the mountains in Turkey, from a valley far above the Black Sea, where we have never been.

Our Snowdrops in the garden were planted by a previous owner, a different family and a different generation. Snowdrops from Crimea, from the Balkans, from the First World War. Ottoman trophies – a few bulbs brought home in soldier’s luggage – memories of friends lost in the chaos and misadventure of war.

The Snowdrop varieties here in our garden at home are the same as growing at the big houses of North Kildare. Snowdrops as a signature of social cohesion, a society within a society, traded as presents among gardeners. Snowdrops in the garden are in a white sward, just across from a granite milepost in a limestone wall, 33 Irish Miles from Dublin, marked on Taylor’s Map of Kildare in the 1770s.

During Iris’s tenure over 50 years, the Snowdrop lawn was augmented with many bulbs. The planted Crocuses and Scilla, Hyacinths and Chinodoxa, Bluebells and Snowflakes, Daffodils and Fritillaries will remain for us, as vestiges to her memory as a friend lost, as we look forward to Snowdrops, as the first signals of Spring.