'A' in Granny Bonnets' Alphabet of Witches

Aurelia Ainsworthy

Have you been lucky enough to see Auriel? She is very shy and gentle: a protective witch. She roams in the quiet of forest and field with her rare and enchanting Golden Oriels.

Both she and her exotic feathered friends favour secluded Poplar groves where hidden together in the dapple of leaves, they can make uplifting magic undisturbed.

Auriel Ainsworthy

Rarely you may glimpse Aurelia walking waist-deep in meadow buttercups and sometimes she hovers wherever children hold the shining golden cups beneath each others' chins.

'Do you like butter?' they will ask.

If there is a golden reflection, the answer of course, is 'yes!'

*Buttercup appears to have some medical uses but results are uncertain and we are advised not to treat our ailments with them in case of blistering of the skin.

**According to the Druids. Poplars symbolized old age because some varieties have white hairs on or beneath the leaves which appear silver in the light. Though these trees stand at the edge of the afterlife, they are also associated with hope and the promise of revival.

Aurelia is the first witch available in Granny Bonnet's Alphabet of Witches Poster series. You can get one here!

Poinsettias

Do you till have your Christmas Poinsettia - Euphorbia pulcherrima? Millions of them are bought at the festive time of the year and and for a few brief days, brighten our homes with splashes of vivid scarlet before limping off to 'death by dustbin', along with old wrapping paper, cards and dried-out Christmas trees. Not surprisingly their survival rate is low, as they originate in Mexico and keel over and die if exposed to temperatures lower than 13 degrees for even as little as fifteen minutes! This means that those appealing plants ranged in the lobby of the newsagent, petrol station or supermarket are probably half-way to horticultural heaven even before they reach the chilly boot of the car... ​ Initially grown for cutting, poinsettias (whose 'petals' are actually coloured leaf-bracts), were commercialised first in the USA. Nowadays grown as potted plants in heated European greenhouses with all the associated tender loving care of vast commercial operations, plus chemicals to keep them healthy and unnaturally small, they are a far cry from the tall and leggy plants growing semi-wild that I remember seeing in the Canary Islands. Personally, I can't help but feel such a lot of time, attention and energy could perhaps be better used cultivating something more beneficial. However, there's no denying that their bright good looks make them an attractive and cheap gift at a time of year when a splash of red (and now also cream, pink and ‘splotched’) is most needed. ​

It is possible to over-winter poinsettias and I did once try but wished I hadn’t bothered as the resulting knobbly, bare branches looked nothing like the plant I had originally bought. So, from now on if I can't find British-grown plants with longer life-span and less travel-miles involved, I’ll stick with my artificial garlands and their very realistic scarlet poinsettia blooms - one of my small ways of reducing carbon imprint as well as waste at Christmas.

Granny Has the Happy Blues

Well, I blinked and almost missed them! Bluebells that is. We have several patches in the garden but somehow the swiftly-growing ground cover about them seems to have caught them up, partially eclipsing them. Besides which, it seems to me more of a forget-me-not year than a bluebell one.

Last week we drove to a venue way out in the countryside and I stopped to photograph the soft, smudgy blueness of forget-me-nots bordering a roadside ditch. They have been prolific this year in my back garden and also under the pine tree out front.

I love shades of blue in the borders, so triple-whammy this year as the Green Alkanet is adding sapphire shades to the backs of the beds (not to mention the nodding heads of purple-blue Granny's Bonnets!) No matter then that our clumps of bluebells are the Spanish variety, larger than our daintier native species; they have to be taller to be seen!

Up above all this verdant undergrowth and like a fluffy overlying coverlet, the ceonothus drapes itself and for the present, my whole world is bathed in a heavenly blue.

Myosotis sylvatica or wood forget-me-not, is a species of flowing plant in the family Boraginaceae, native to Europe. Spring-flowering, and occasionally pink, it is the familiar forget-me-not of our gardens and giving them represents a promise of remembrance, fidelity and faithfulness.