Elle Bean and the Foxgloves
Elle Bean and the Foxgloves
On Saturday morning the hawthorns along the lane beyond the farm stood bridal white, laden with blossom and sweetly scented. Since then, their petals have begun to soften into a confetti pink and the trees have gently changed colour, even as I have been ambling about beneath then, walking Bruno, weeding and visiting the calves. I spend hours outside each day but still these transitions take me by surprise. My challenge to myself at the start of this year was to pay greater attention to the day-by-day changes that mark the evolving seasons in quiet shifts of colour, texture, shape, size and sound. And yet, I miss transitions all the time. If I become absorbed deep in my chores and thoughts, even for just a few days, then when I return to awareness it is to find changes in the fields and hedgerows. One day there are oak leaves where before there were just tight buds; suddenly there are daisies, their petals open to the sun, while the dandelions have become pale lollipop heads turning to ghostly seed dust in the wind.
In the last day or so, the foxglove flowers have begun to open at the base of their tall stems. First the petals swell just enough for their colour to become visible and then the flower bells begin to open, starting at the base of the spike. Within a day or so, these bells reverberate with the hum of bees, guided inside by the freckles on the lower lip of each flower. I remember the Foxglove Fairy from my childhood books as a purple-pink tomboy in leggings and shorts sitting above the leaves of the flower stem. Had you asked me at breakfast time on Saturday then I would have told you that I am too old to be a flower fairy. Too old by about forty years and masses of white hair. And yet, by lunchtime on Saturday, I had been christened a foxglove.
Elle named me as a foxglove while she helped me water the vegetable beds at the farm. In fact, I was more thoroughly watered than any of the flowers or vegetables because Elle loved the splashy rainbow arcs thrown by the new hose that runs from the old washhouse into the garden. I gave Elle the hose to distract her from the rumble-bump of her dad and granddad setting off in tractors to mend the bridge in the second field and it took her only minutes to realise that watering me was much, much more fun than giving the peas a good soaking. Already drenched, I tried to redirect Elle and the direction of the hose, “Water the potatoes, Elle, and the foxgloves. Over that way.” But Elle pointed the hose straight at me, “You are a foxglove,” she shouted, her curls spangled with water droplets. “You are a foxglove. I water you!”
After ten minutes with Elle and the hose, my mascara was running down my face and my soaking wet shorts and shirt stuck to me so that I shivered a bit, even under the hot sun. Elle was so excited that she’d done an accidental wee in the back porch of the farmhouse and ditched her dress and pants in favour of dry nakedness. At three and a bit, Elle likes to be known as Elle Bean because that is what her Aunty Dan calls her. Elle is, of course, oblivious to the US clothing brand; instead she sees herself as something more organic and very important: a green garden bean perhaps, or something that might grow in Jack and the Beanstalk’s veg patch. Elle Bean likes Disney princess jigsaw puzzles and she loves to look under rocks for creepy-crawlies of all sorts. She also loves to munch on the aniseed stems of sweet cicely and she can eat mango slices at an alarming rate.
At the moment, Elle is not a big fan of pants but Granny Tonia arrived at the farmhouse just in time to find Elle something to wear while her dress dried on the bench by the back door. Elle returned to the garden in a slightly too-big witch’s dress from the dressing-up box and I persuaded her to wear her pink sandals so that her feet didn’t get prickled when she played in the long grass under the copper beech tree. Elle completed her outfit with a pale blue Elsa-from-Frozen baseball cap and some thick smudges of sunscreen on her nose and mouth. Then, as Tonia and I had coffee, Elle rubbed bright yellow buttercup pollen against her cheekbone, adding to the pink halo of watermelon around her mouth left over from her morning snack.
Before lunch, Tonia and I went on a little walk up the lane with the pink sandaled, buttercup smudged, watermelon haloed, baseball capped witch-without-pants. Elle wanted to check for bugs, worms and ants under the strips of corrugated iron that Tonia places in the lane as wildlife shelters and I thought that I might dry off a bit in the sunny breeze. We passed beneath the tall white hawthorn princesses and I asked Tonia about stitchwort and speedwell. I’d been noticing the star-like white petals and the tiny string of sapphire flowers for days but I’d lost their names and I was keen to be able to identify them properly. Tonia and I wondered whether we had correctly identified the first grey-green leaves of field scabious and we crouched beside the tiny Elle Bean witch to study the frenzied scurry of ants under the raised metal sheets. I had intended to spend my morning mowing the lawn and answering emails but, somewhere beneath the hawthorns and on edge of my consciousness, I noticed a transition: perhaps this was the sort of morning that a Foxglove Fairy might have, awash with flowers and water droplets, with a small Elle Bean friend, a wise granny and the distant chug of tractors for company.