Nettles

The may is out- and has been for a week, the chestnuts are in bloom- and the nettles- which seem to put on inches overnight- will soon have rendered the places they grow in impassable.

When I was a kid I had a long tree root with a knotty end which I reckoned was a club. I once laid into a huge nettlebed with it, scattering swatches of mashed up green stuff- and carried away with battle fury- smacked it into a fence post the nettles were hiding and cracked it- so rendering it useless for the dispatching of Nemaean lions and Hydras and other such menaces...

Serve me right for being so mindlessly destructive.

Nettles are just about the first kind of greenery to move in on a burn site, you can make soup with them- and they provide a habitat for butterflies...

Chestnut Tree

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B. Yeats