At the end of my last post, the poem Heat, I mentioned that I was working on some pieces that grew out of our recent walking holiday in Northumberland – on the way to Lindisfarne. I’m still working on the poems – one of the later ones by the logic of the walk has come first, and I’m wondering how best to order them….. However, a month or so back I wrote this piece – a quick garden poem – which I thought I’d share with you while I’m working on that sequence.

British readers may have heard about, or remember, the terrible loss of elm trees in our landscape in the 1970’s. Here and there, some elms are returning as low growing hedge-trees, or elm variants such as the wych elm. When I saw this little beauty growing in a wild spot in my garden, I thought at first it was a hazel – but it’s an elm, I believe a wych elm. I’m so delighted that this quite rare tree has found refuge with me. Nature has a deep capacity to find a way, and that continues at least for now. Life wants to live. Sometimes, it needs our help, as with the red kite, and at others, it needs space to seed itself – although I don’t know what love and care may have gone into tending this tree’s ancestors. We keep working, keep making space, keep seeking to give life room. For some, it is too late, but each part of the web of life we cherish matters more than we can imagine.