Harvested Field
Last year this field was set with barley, this year with wheat. Before it was harvested, round the edge of the wheat were a few stalks of barley, left over from last year’s crop. After a long hot summer the days now are cooler, with flashes of heavy rain. Almost all the fields have now been cropped, except for some of the barley. Along the edge of a barley field I came across a man gathering blackberries, he eulogised apple and blackberry pie (d’accord, monsieur). The year is on the wane. If I wasn’t out taking photographs, maybe would probably be lost in my own thoughts, instead of looking outwards at the fields of the Borders. The fireweed is beginning to fray. The skies are banked with clouds. There are red berries in the hedges. The Scottish children are back at school.
Poppyfield
When my son was young, more than twenty years ago, I remember passing a heap of dusty earth outside a farm gate and seeing a bunch of poppies growing there, and thinking that was some sight, as poppies had almost completely disappeared from the fields of the North. A week or so ago, my husband, who walks about six miles a day, told me that on his walk he had come across a field full of poppies which had been left to grow amongst the rape, and that maybe it was something I would like to see. So on a hot day last week I went out on a longer trek to search out this field. I walked out into this field through the first gate, and waded into the grass beneath an enormous, humming pylon, and started to photograph the poppies there:
Then I heard, above the noise of the pylon and the hum of the summer’s day, my voice being called, and saw across the field my husband, in his straw hat and mauve walking jacket, who in the course of his normal walk had caught sight of my head above the rape and poppies and grass. He told me that if we went on down the lane and round the corner there was a good view of the poppies as they stretched away towards the horizon of the field. I followed his advice, and when I got to the spot, leant across the fence and photographed the poppies from there:
Then I walked on furthedown the road which leads to Lennel, and thence to Coldstream, still following the poppies, until I got to a gate right at the edge, which I could get over. There I took some pictures of the poppies close-up, including them waving against the sky, and being blown almost inside-out by the wind:
Since looking at the poppies, I have been painting a boat in a bright poppy colour. Maybe after I have finished the paintings for an exhibition coming up shortly, I might might paint some poppies. Although I may not, because I would not capture their life, their silkiness, their delicacy. Maybe they will find their way into the illustrations for “The Midnight Hare”, not all of which takes place at midnight. Whatever comes of my experience of the poppyfield, I went home feeling good.
Field in the Wind
Along a field beside River Tweed the wind was ruffling the young wheat, blowing it across as if it was an acre of silk. I took some close-up pictures of the wheat, they were very green, the greenest pictures I have ever taken, dark green between the stalks, then pale ears and the green sprays, and the surface of the field very pale. Green is a colour I have difficulty with in painting, I hardly use it except that deep fir green, or a very dark viridian with blue and maybe sienna added to it, to muddy it up. There was something about the wind moving across the wheatfield that harked back to an earlier time. Maybe it was the memory of the field of corn that we had opposite the house where we lived near Ardingly in Sussex, when I was a child. I must be haunted by this field, as I sometimes find I have put it in paintings (and then gold-brown, not green); though it has now become intertwined with images of the fields above Oxenrig, those places of hawk and hare, where I like best to walk. In that field of long ago, I remember harvesters putting the crop into stooks, in the late summer evening. The field is still there, I Google-earthed it, and the lane beside it, and the farm in the dip at the end of the lane, with its pond – though if I went back, perhaps it would be completely changed, even if from far up it looks the same.
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