They are the ones who park directly under the trees. You can tell the visitors to the neighbourhood. The bats are on the move, sitting in the street trees overnight, eating the emerging flowers and pooing their seedy diarrhoea over the parked cars. The “open for inspection” signs are spreading almost as quickly as the weeds, as people feel that restlessness, that desire for fresh possibilities and new real estate. I nearly set the neighbour’s fence on fire. There I was, last weekend, with what I like to refer to as my flamethrower, “percing to the roote”. It gives out a lick of flame, searing the unwanted growth without the use of poison. I have a new toy – a magic wand from Bunnings powered by a gas cartridge. Weeds are growing between the pavers in the backyard, and in the bluestone lane that divides my property from the McDonald’s car park. Nature has pricketh-ed these birds in the balls, and they see everything as a threat. The magpies are swooping in the dog park, causing my bouncy mongrel bull mastiff-plus to stop in her tracks, puzzled by the snap of wings above her head. The wasp has gone, off to make more trees spindly and unproductive.Īt this time of year, I reckon I have about a week left to get out my scalpel. If you can see little holes in the swelling, it’s too late. The trick is to cut them off, or shave them with a scalpel, before the wasp escapes. The gall wasp lays her eggs on twigs and branches about August, and by summer the swellings become gross deformities. The swollen stems on the light-starved lemon tree are reminding me that I must tackle them soon, before the wasps emerge. The jonquil bulbs I lost last year, and therefore did not “lift and store” as all good gardeners should do, have announced themselves with nodding white flowers in among the other things I planted over the top, thus disrupting my chaotic attempts at garden design. The worms in the worm farm are brimming over the lip, breeding so fast that the twice-weekly bucket of stinky kitchen scraps is not enough to keep them from mounting their own slimy pilgrimages. The growth on the citrus trees shows signs of outrunning the possums in their attempt to eat everything to the ground. I recite them quietly to myself as I stride around my tiny inner-city garden, noting my own markers of spring. So it is Chaucer’s words that come to me every spring. It is September, not April, and I garden on ancient lands where the pilgrimages belong to the world’s oldest continuous culture – one that we recent transplants can try to understand but in which we cannot claim roots. Or to roughly translate: little birds start to sing, and sleep all night with eyes open, because nature pricks them in their hearts. Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages Read it aloud in Middle English, as my hopelessly old-school literary teacher once made me do, and you can almost hear the rising of the sap.Īnd my sap is rising, here on the other side of the world and seven centuries on from Chaucer. The Middle English is a barrier to modern readers, let alone modern gardeners – but you still get the drift. Another of my personal signs of spring is a resurgence in dinner party debates about the correct time to plant out tomatoes. People want to go on pilgrimages for many reasons, most of them not holy, and some of them more to do with a flight from the self than a move to contemplation. One of the canterbury pilgrims crossword full#Chaucer’s spring is full of restless energy and wildness, violent passions, mating and animals rutting. Every vein is bathed in liquid of such power that it makes flowers. The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,Ī rough translation: the sweet showers of April pierce the soil to the roots, ending the March droughts. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The opening lines to the prologue are some of the most powerful writing about spring in English literature – or any literature. Spring, Chaucer wrote in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, is the time when people begin to stir themselves, and think of going on pilgrimages.
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