Blades of grass

One of my best charity shop buys recently has been a French tapestry kit 'Le Marais' (The Marsh).  It was on sale for £2.50 having been started and then abandoned by a person who, I guess, reckoned that the 38 hours estimated to complete it were insufficient.  I took it to my craft group last month and one of the members suggested that the colours such as blue, turquoise, black, white, russet and green could have been what attracted the eye of the beholder.  
My tapestry depicts a marsh at night with bullrushes waving in the breeze and wildfowl flying across the face of the full moon.

As I started to work on it I realised that of course this is a representation, an interpretation and is closer to a painting than a photograph.  None of these lovely strong colours would show up in reality.  The moonlight would bleach them all to shades of grey.  And yet, since I bought it I have been looking more closely at the reeds and the grasses of Lancashire's estuaries.   And I conclude that whoever designed my tapestry and whoever translated it to a screen print on canvas have spent a long time looking at the saltmarsh, how coarse grasses colonise in clumps as the sea recedes, how blades grow from the stem and wave and cross each other in the wind.

Blown on the wind...

Sitting in the garden shed yesterday evening I was enjoying the sounds of the woodland birds and yet unable to 'tune out' the noise of traffic which reverberates across our suburb as two of our regional motorways meet just over a mile away.  When either the wind drops completely, or blows from that quarter then from out of the unvarying rush-hour rumble I can distinguish motorcycles accelerating, heavy lorries passing and sometimes also the clack of the train on the West Coast Mainline.  I was struck by the duration and monotony of human-generated noise and its contrast with birdsong.

Birdsong is woven into an aural, dimensional tapestry.  Finches sing from high trees, housemartins cry as they wheel in the air.  Sparrows chirp in the middle spaces of the hedge, blackbirds position themselves on vantage points to signal their territories.  Doves and woodpigeons prefer to coo from the chimney pots and magpies announce themselves in the birches with harsh cries.   This pattern and spacing is dotted across the backgardens of our avenue and into the park. 

Every bird has a song of a different duration.  I have timed the finch and he sings a short snatch every 10 to 12 seconds, which although repetitious is not annoying.   Birdsong, unlike traffic, is produced at a volume pleasing to the human ear, there is variation and harmony and to this untutored listener who wonders what key they are using, there appear no discords.