20 11 07

There is a second flush of growth in oak & other trees, known as lammas growth. It happens in the summer & is a response to temperature & other factors favourable to a fresh surge of growth. The tree is most prone to this when it’s young; it doesn’t happen in old trees. Nicolas Battey, writing in the Journal of Experimental Botany: “This decline could be conceived as learning from experience . . . A youthful tree shows lammas growth. It seems an enthusiasm, an impetuous response to summer warmth and light. With age, it declines, and the tree settles down to more sedate growth.” It’s a kind of freedom of expressive growth; it’s not the expansion of spring laid down the previous year. I don’t doubt that trees also learn from experience; to see any tree in Sunart oakwoods reacting, however slowly, to prevailing wind & the falling of old limbs from gales & lightning is to see trees balancing on rocky slopes in a decades long dance.

Lammas Day (“so call’d from the Mass said for preservation of Lambs”) is perhaps a Christian pilfering of Lughnasadh, the festival to celebrate the start of the harvest season, the growth that has given the first fruit.

It may be there is a correlative to trees’ lammas growth in the ragged robin & the spear thistle; a learning & an urge to make a fresh spurt, an utterance of life. An impetuous response. A song.

Also with a new burst of expansion are the jet planes, which have not yet made their eastward migration, but were only waiting on fine weather to make their high-sky vapour hieroglyphs, which fade to parentheses & the symbol for eternity; a figure eight on its side. These offensive jets (I’m using the MoD term) are Harriers & Tornadoes. Somewhere between the swept back wings of Tornadoes are Storm Shadow & Brimstone missiles, as well as General Purpose Bombs & Cluster Bombs which sow their submunitions over a couple of acres to flower at will. In other fields. Some of these aircraft rip to Ardnamurchan from Lossiemouth, about 150 miles as the crow flies. The vapour symbols are probably scrawled by a defensive Typhoon; the Eurofighter.

Among the boats returning to land fish today are: New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Fruitful Vine, Fruitful Harvest, Harvest Hope & Ocean Harvest.