hare’s corner

When I was feeling homesick in Berlin I would play an album by Colm Mc Con Iomaire called The Hare’s Corner / Cúinne an Ghiorra. Something about the space and lift and surge of it filled that gap and spoke of home.

Our house now sits at the corner of a big field. This year it is a potato field. We watched from our upstairs windows for days as the farmer cleared and tilled and sowed row upon row. Symmetrical, factory line perfection, until a fox skittered across it during the night. There’ll be no buying spuds for a few months once they’re grown I’m told, we can just nip through the hedge and pull up a few.

In early spring the hares started to appear in our garden. The first was kangaroo-like in her stature and size. Such strong hind legs and tall alertness. Such great excitement following her through the garden each morning. The same pause in the same spot, the same bound for the gate.

We had been looking for a name for our house but nothing had sat right. And then my mum mentioned an interview with Colm speaking about his album and what a Hare’s Corner was.

The hare doesn’t burrow, but nests, and so traditionally for each field he cultivated an Irish farmer would leave one corner wild for the hare. A corner untamed, a corner for transformation and possibility. A corner for nature, and indeed magic, to take the lead. In Irish folklore the hare was revered for her agility and fertility and ‘was seen as a shape shifter, transforming from woman to hare and back again, often at full moon.’

Our home sits at the corner of a field and is home to these shape shifters.

The garden and the gardening had begun to stress me out. I would look out the window and see the masses of weeds, everything growing in spots they shouldn’t and then patches where nothing seemed to grow at all. It was starting to feel like a battle. There was one area in particular that was covered in old woodchips and, increasingly, an invasive weed that did not like to be pulled. Let’s turn it in to a wildflower meadow I said. But we need to kill the weeds first. And so we sprayed them. But as I watched Brian out the window something felt wrong. He wore a mask to protect him from the stuff. I kept the children inside. And I spent the next morning banging on the glass as I spotted first a baby rabbit and then a proud hare nibbling at the poisoned ground.

I started reading a book by Mary Reynolds, an Irish garden designer who won the Chelsea Flower Show with a garden of wild flowers and ancient stones. She writes of how we are guardians of our land. Of how traditionally Irish farmers would have walked the boundaries of their land to keep curses at bay and to tell the soil that they would care for all within those trodden borders. She likens weed killer to chemotherapy for the land. Oh jaysus the guilt!

She writes about how the land holds our memories, our joys and our sorrows. I think of a piece I read during the recent referendum about a man and his mother. And the walk they took in the fields near their home. Her showing him the unmarked spots where the village’s unbaptised babies were buried. Including her own. The land took them in with open arms when others would not.

I think of a recent NPR interview with author Michael Pollan and him saying he has a sense that plants have personalities and an understanding of things too.

I think of the overwhelming feeling I had as I read the Ryan Report for the first time. That the land, the soil, the earth beneath us was holding such pain. Back then I wrote a piece about it. I’ve posted it here if you’d like to read it. I never got it quite right, but here it is either which way.

When we first moved in I was full of plans for the land. Too many trees, casting shadow, blocking the light. Hedges that had to go. Plants I didn’t like. But my garden has other ideas. It says Yes this hedge may be in a funny spot, but it is a warm arm of a windbreaker so you can sit while the wind blusters at full tilt. It says Look, don’t move this willow tree, it casts dappled light across your table while you eat. It says Listen to the sea-like swoosh of the millions of leaves you have surrounding you, embrace the woodland, don’t knock it down. Mary Reynolds writes that sometimes your land chooses you, to give you what you need. My land is teaching me to love what I have and be patient, to sometimes move slow, to wait and see.

I have walked the boundaries of this ¾ acre on the corner of a field. I have promised to care for it, take my time with it, learn what it needs, listen to what it has to teach me. I have welcomed in the wildness, the magic.

Welcome to Hare’s Corner.