I found umpteen oaklings while puin bracken fae the maw o the sleeping dragon.
Joyful scrunching, birdsong, heart song
accompanied the great piling up
towers of bracken to be devoured by the days and moon full nights into delicious crumble
topping for the fruit trees and bushes
themselves biding time till they’re serenade by human touch and voice and love and praise and fed a bit with the crumble compost
~
Eight years ago we run a course on restoring ex sitka spruce plantation land. One of the practical tasks that weekend was shifting the hoard of brash left by the loggers so we could actually move through the landscape. In half an hour, with 20 or so of us we started the breast height dead hedge we named the sleeping dragon.
Coupled with brash the sleeping dragon is a haven for bracken, it having been allowed free rein since the land use change from sheep pasture to plantation in the late seventies. It’s a shallow, rocky slope here under the way leave.
Bracken is an unruly, bizm of a plant. I love it. It’s had an easy spread across this shallow, rocky, slope. We truddle some areas and pu ithers keeping a close eye on whits working until the trees get up enough tae dae their job better than us.
Until then we’ll keep joyfully gaitherin it up for crumble.
