Flower Child

She collects mussels from the shore and drinks jasmine tea by the sandbucketful, the flower wavering beneath her lips like a sea anemone. She was always a hoarder of flowers. In her student days, they filled her rickety room. Jam jars and jam jars, and behind them more, of musty rootwater. She picked wildflowers before there were laws against that sort of thing, holed up shy little vole, making her meticulous botanical studies. Now she only picks the flowers in her gardens. She leaves the wild orchids to the bees though. That the landscape could produce such tender flowers, blushing, freckled things.

By contrast, Dartington’s prettiness is cultivated. Totnes, though however unlikely, might have a claim to being the birthplace of British Civilisation. Ardnamurchan is where that Civilisation ends. Hadrian’s Wall might have mostly come down, but it’s there in spirit. The wind gives the landscape something of a facial peel. Trees bent as barbed wire, hillsides scoured away with pan-scrubbers. Used to be a military site, but the shell scars barely scratched the surface of the mountains’ wild silence. Her face is scrubbed blank too. Given a vigorous, rigorous clean with carbolic soap and heather every morning before she sits down behind the potters’ wheel. That’s what she learnt here. It doesn’t seem so long ago, perhaps because, aside from revolutionary spirit and length of hair, she has barely changed. Merely moved from a breeding ground to a retirement home for old hippies, and gradually grown into the landscape.