26 Trees

COMMON/PRIVATE

Paired, my trees mark gates of the old workhouse
(now private residential streets, like many),
surround themselves with (I’ve just learned this word)
suckers – new growth that gardeners control.
Their bark is grey. Not photo grey but live,
gnarled and with recent branches offering
leaves greenfly have holed. The trees stand tall,
one bent. The tree book keeps them with X rating.

This was my contribution to the 26 Trees project, one of many from 26 Characters that have stimulated me since 2015.  My brief was to write 62 words of prose or verse about an individual lime tree (a pair of them was acceptable) in Cambridgeshire, plus 400 words on the background to the species.  Click on the project link above, then follow your nose.

The ex-workhouse is that of St Ives, Cambridgeshire -- across the River Ouse from the town, and now on the eastern edge of the village of Hemingford Grey, whose manor house drew an unrelated poem from me in 2018. 

The X rating is the mark given to the Common Lime in Alan Mitchell's The trees of Britain and Northern Europe, which rates the gardenworthiness of trees as follows:

I -- first-class

II -- good

III -- mediocre

X -- little or nothing to commend it.

And one question in the 400 background words remains unanswered.  Who was this elusive French chemist Missa, and in what century did they live?

26 Trees was a joint project with the Woodland Trust, who generously presented participants with saplings of their species.  What I did with mine is this:

It's in! For TreeCharterDay, my 26trees lime from @WoodlandTrust. Planted in the grounds of @WorksopPrioryCE by their kind permission, and with help from @hughcrispin & other green-fingered kin. Dedicated to parents Ivon & Barbara Baker (1928-2011 and 1932-2008). 

Fluid

FLUID

The riverside

manor we reached by a wet morning's ride.

They lent us towels as we went inside.

The moistened scene 

of 50s children's stories that had been

more in Clare's childhood than mine, the dark green

leaves sheltering 

our locked bikes from the low sky watering

July, most of the trip, even that thing

when the day cleared

briefly, the undrained bike path by a weird

reflection momentarily appeared

swimmer-deep under-sun waterway-blue;

not bike then but canal boat or canoe.

'Fluid' was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week.Start now.  Keep going (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2015); the prompt in question was to write a poem about water.

The riverside manor is the old house at Hemingford Grey that was the setting for Lucy Boston's book The children of Green Knowe.  The undrained bike path is the bridleway alongside Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, and the visit is one that wife Clare and I paid to Hemingford Manor by that route in July 2011.

I posted 'Fluid' to the Places of Poetry map in October 2019.  Places of Poetry I strongly recommend to passengers or walkers who are finding a long journey tedious.  Look on PofP and see what poems have been inspired by places you pass through!