calendar note: willow

Saille / Willow from the Celtic Tree Oracle

Willow-magic centres on the seeds being ripe and the leaves being green. Here in the valley, the sap has barely risen yet, tips of the buds only just showing silver at the end of this cycle of the moon. I must have mis-remembered spring last year when planning out this calendar project.

Aside from all the exhaustion of moving, the seasonal lack of green willow boughs and catkin wool has limited what I could do with willow from a practical perspective. The Moon-ruled willow, perhaps more than many other trees, lies dormant in the dark days of the year, but is all the more vibrant as it slowly waxes green. Anyone who has spent an afternoon by the dreaming beneath willows at the water’s edge – or watched a performance in the green sanctuary of the living willow theatre – knows the enchantment of these trees in the fullness of their leaves.

I am lucky enough to live in an area where willow weaving and charcoal-making is practised and taught. One of my post-lockdown dreams for the year is to attend some weaving workshops and learn to make my own foraging basket. And local willow charcoal, made from the shoots of such a vigorous regenerative tree, seems like an excellent medium for sketching out my place-based dreams.

Meanwhile, as willow slowly wakes, alder and hazel are already dancing with catkins in the hedgerows. From this point onwards, the cycle of the moon before the vernal equinox will be dedicated to one of these more wakeful trees.

the language of northern nightingales

…the blackcap doth his ear assail
With such a brisk and potent matin-song,
He half begins to think the nightingale
Hath in her monthly reckoning counted wrong.

John Clare, ‘Sonnet’

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the blackcap

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We have lived here a week now, in a street sandwiched between the canal and the riverside. The far bank of the river is a little flood plain filled with dancing willows; the far bank of the canal is a scrubby patch of land which our neighbours are slowly transforming into an orchard. We fall asleep to the sound of rushing water, and wake up to birdsong.

This is a quieter, gentler, more wooded corner of the valley than our former home, and it is teeming with birds. A tame robin often sits on a tangle of honeysuckle near the local Co-op, delighting children who stand right next to it as it sings. There is a nesting pair of dippers in our local stretch of river; several wrens, tits, and finches; and at the weekend I even heard a family of green woodpeckers yaffling on the hill above. But of all the songs in this new place, the most beautiful and least familiar (to me) belongs to the blackcap.

Blackcaps, like other warblers, are migratory visitors to this island, but they stay closer than most of their cousins. As our traditional seasons unravel in climate confusion, more and more of them are staying for our warmer, wetter winters. I only hope they are not caught out by the cold snap of spring.