Sir Walter Scott: The Black Dwarf (1816)

The Black Dwarf was published as the first volume of the first series of Tales of My Landlord; the other three were occupied by Old Mortality. Scott doubted if the Black Dwarf material was up to scratch, allowed a friendly reader to confirm his own suspicions, and so brought the curtain down more quickly than he'd originally planned. Here the classic Scott gear-change is more jarring than thrilling.

This, at any rate, is Scott's account of the matter in the final paragraph of his 1830 Introduction. But the Edinburgh University Library page gives a different impression. According to this page the ending was rushed because Scott was being pressured by his new publishers Blackwood and Murray. It also seems to suggest that the original plan for Tales of My Landlord was four one-volume tales. That could be reconciled with Scott's own account only if this plan was a short-lived idea that was already on the scrapheap by the time Scott was composing the The Black Dwarf.  Anyway, Old Mortality was surely conceived on spacious lines from the first.

The main deficiency that Scott talks about is the Black Dwarf himself, and certainly this static creation (Note 1) doesn't convince as a realistic portrait. Nevertheless I'm sure that Scott's insights into the anguish of being cursed with a monstrous appearance must have influenced the young Mary Shelley, who was just starting to write Frankenstein when The Black Dwarf appeared*.

Besides the deficiencies of the lead character, the book has a perfunctory insurrection (how unlike the one in Old Mortality!) and a double kidnap that incomprehensibly fizzles out. So reading the book is more a matter of salvaging lovely details than committing to the tale as a whole. But the details are worth your trouble. This is Scott in 1816, after all!


For a start there's the opening few pages describing the April snow and the sheep-farmers' glorious conversation at Pattieson's village pub (with self-serving intrusions from Jedediah) (Note 2) And that segues very nicely into Hobbie Elliot returning across Mucklestane Moor after an unsuccessful day's deer-stalking, his meeting and conversation with Patrick Earnscliff. Scott is brilliant at evoking the open moor, though he forgets to tells us the time of year (it must be autumn, however).

This excellent start is slightly troubled by a premature jump of nearly a year; when we pick up the action again, with Elshie being now well established in his hovel, it's the following August (the heath is in full bloom).

Elshie's first meeting with Isabel Vere is a moving if rather emblematic scene. Willie of Westburnflat (in conversation with Elshie) is a brief firework.

After the fizzled-out kidnappings, the second half of the book begins - with a clumsy flashback. Nevertheless the scene between Isabel and her father Ellieslaw is good, until it's baldly interrupted with "At this moment four ruffians rushed upon them". The unprincipled Ellieslaw is a pleasing character and so is the attractively quixotic Mareschal, but part of the failing of this second half of the book is that Scott has little definite conception of the third rebel Sir Frederick Langley. This character, we feel, needed to be a straightforward but formidable bad guy. But Scott skimps on devoting any time to introducing Sir Frederick and, when he does bring him on-stage, immediately exposes him to Ratcliffe's unjust accusation, which rather wrong-foots us. Langley does not seem a nice guy, but now he's been blatantly traduced.  Soon afterwards he's heard describing Earnscliff as "a sprightly young fellow". Surely a solidly bad villain ought to hate the hero?  The plot's supposed to turn on Ellieslaw's abject fear of Langley, but what, we wonder, is so fearful about him?  The rebellion never gains momentum; it falls apart at a touch, and we're mainly impressed by the instant willingness of the participants to use treachery as a bargaining tool.

Despite these defects the book achieves a certain dignity in its final pages. Part of that is to do with the Black Dwarf's disappearance and death; no Dickensian conversion here from misanthropy to domesticity. I also like the distorted account of events in Ellieslaw's complacent letter from abroad.


Note 1. I call him static because the early chapters all take place at his croft and because he claims to be too immobilized to think of going to warn Hobbie Elliott about the raid; he has no horse and perhaps his legs are too short to ride one. But towards the end he shows up suddenly at Ellieslaw and I suppose we must assume he was transported there by Ratcliffe.

Note 2. This opening should be understood as following on from Jedediah's splendid "Introduction to the Tales of My Landlord", which these days is usually found prefixed to Old Mortality.

I'm not sure if Scott in the end didn't intend the whole of The Black Dwarf as a sort of fancy portal to OM, with which it is so incommensurate. A recurrent theme in BD is that insurrections, violence, duels and feuds don't really matter; they're all treated lightly and seem to be without serious consequence. In that respect its presiding genii are the reiver Willie of Westburnflat and the wild but honourable rebel Mareschal.

This inconsequence is, of course, in marked contrast to the deadly outcomes of its greater companion.

*

By the way, how on earth could Elshie fail to be recognized as Sir Edward Mauley, given his highly distinctive appearance?



* This is not the first time that The Black Dwarf has been claimed as the source of some better-known book, In 1937 Florence Swinton Dry argued that it lay behind Wuthering Heights. She didn't convince most other scholars, but maybe this is worth further consideration (time for an inter-library loan, maybe?). From what I've heard , Dry's chief argument has to do with The Black Dwarf being "a moorland novel of revenge", which it isn't, really. She also finds some parallels between the misanthropic speeches of Elshie and Heathcliff'; e.g. a not very persuasive parallel in which "worms" and "writhe" are used in close proximity.

When I say it's worth further consideration, I don't mean because Scott's influence is a matter of interest per se. The Brontes had Scott's novels on their shelves and there was no doubt influence of a sort. Dry also proposed that Nelly Dean's name came from Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian - well, who knows, and who cares?

And then Ian Jack spent most of an amiable but perplexing preface arguing that Lockwood derives from the various incomer heroes of Scott's novels (Introduction to Wuthering Heights, Worlds Classics edition). Which only reinforces the conclusion that Lockwood is a very insignificant frame figure who has no role in the action (unlike Waverley, Lovel, or Roland).

The question that matters about Wuthering Heights is its startling originality. How did that come about? And the only reason why it might be worth looking again at Scott (or George Sand, or James Hogg...)  is because it's possible that some ingredient from them might shed light on the mystery of how Emily came to imagine her scenes. Some ingredient that Emily absorbed and worked over in the unconscious. (Because, consciously speaking, the whole atmosphere texture and method of Wuthering Heights is flagrantly un-Scott-like.)


Scott's novels: A brief guide

D. S. Marriott Poetry links

[This mini-note about the poet D.S. Marriott has moved to Intercapillary Space:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/ds-marriott-poetry-links.html


Instead, here's a bit of "The Dog Enchanter":

What if he were to set off
panting through the ruins
swishing his tale
                     over debris
mooching near the craters
the full-throated bark
deep inside the vertebrae
synchronized
           to the weak, the yielding—
his trick to know that ‘ghost’
isn’t the right word for
                              scents
maundering his way
over the ragged ridgeline
where mines make effigies of sense
                 and the universe presses in
pissing on the leafless trees:
                out there, see him return,
                              where the dust
makes his tracks so easy to see
                      as the journey opens before him
                      his cry impending.
                             Yes, see him return...

midsummer wood

New leaves of Common Box (Buxus sempervirens)

Not-yet-open panicles of Tufted Hair-grass (Deschampsia cespitosa).

Decaying puffball.

This and the next three photos show an outbreak of Bearded Couch (Elymus caninus).

Elymus caninus, stems and leaves

John Aubrey: The Natural History of Wiltshire (1656-91)

John Aubrey in 1666, portrait by William Faithorne

[Image from the Ashmolean Museum website]

The book I have read is in fact an abridgement first published in 1847. The book was not published in Aubrey’s lifetime and represents a sort of ongoing compendium of “papers” that was added to over many years. He had freely offered these papers to Dr Plott, so he does not seem to have thought of them as a book, even when “tumultuarily stitch’t up”.

[This 1847 edition is available on E-Gutenberg.]

I pointed out a maybug on the pavement of a residential street in Bath. “Look at his antennae, they look like fans”, I lectured happily to a child in the vicinity -  “and look! his poo is green!” The child lingered while we strolled off up the hill. When we were far enough off, there was a stamping sound.

Of his own secret impulse to “make a scrutinie into the waies of nature”, Aubrey says that generally “’Twas held a sinne”, and of himself “Credit there was none; for it gets the contempt of a man’s neighbours”. So it does still, except in highly buffered zones such as universities (where, however, Natural History is not regarded as a subject).

"Natural History" certainly gets away with a lot.  In Aubrey’s book, it's an almost unlimited subject: it comprises,( apart from weather, plants, animals, etc,)  such things as architecture, agriculture, the “historie of cloathing” (i.e. the cloth trade), notable families and “accidents”. This scopelessness is essential. (And why tie yourself down to Wiltshire? Aubrey is quite content to go outside his county when he as something interesting to report.)

Aubrey saw things differently from us. In his time people didn’t move around much, and some districts were healthier than others, so that he speaks of the North Wiltshire folk, for example, as “phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit; hereabout is but little tillage or hard labour, they only milke the cowes and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milke meates, which cooles their braines too much, and hurts their inventions” etc. etc. The explanations sound like guesses, but his observation may be fairly sound. Man in those days was an animal who varied with his habitats. Now we are all under glass, so to speak, and a uniform strain.

On June 3rd, 1647, Aubrey’s mother noticed the sky, in which two rainbowy circles were intersecting around the sun. As Aubrey remarks, she might not have noticed it at all but for the accident of going outside to look at the dial. I saw something similar while on the beach at Benidorm (30/3/02 18:00), though on this occasion there was thin cloud, the sort that makes sundogs visible, but Aubrey says that when his mother saw the haloes “it was a very cleare day”. No-one else in Benidorm seemed to be aware of the phenomenon, which lasted all the time we were walking back to the hotel. Just being outside (as most people must have been in June) was not enough - “few took notice of it because it was so near the sunbeams”.

[I saw three suncave arcs and two sunvex arcs. If they were the Parry arcs and other exotic haloes, I am obviously lucky or spend too much time looking at the sky. I can also report an authentic Wiltshire observation; a complete lunar rainbow seen while driving westward on the A303 at Amesbury (19/1/03 19:20). The rainbow appeared for only a couple of minutes. To me it looked like a white beam, arising as from a spotlight, but bent into a bow. I was driving and couldn’t pull over in time to have a good look, but Laura said she could make out faint rainbow colours, in particular if she didn’t look at it directly. From these somewhat casual remarks you will gather that we had never heard of lunar rainbows and consequently had no idea of their intense rarity (the Met Office receives about two reports a year). If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have stopped dead on the carriageway. Alas! it’s most unlikely that any person previously informed about lunar rainbows has ever gone on to see one. Has a lunar rainbow ever been photographed? And those colours... – if only we’d checked, we could have dealt a blow to the common surmise that the moon doesn’t produce enough light for a lunar rainbow to be coloured. But Laura can’t rule out the possibility that the colour she saw was just the tinting along the top of my windscreen...] 

The difficulty of discussing plants in the days before Linnaeus is brought home to us vividly. At Priory St Mary: “In this ground calver-keys, hare-parsely, wild vetch, maiden’s honesty, polypodium, fox-gloves, wild-vine, bayle.” John Ray, who wrote some contemporary notes on the manuscript, complained: “Calver-keys, hare’s-parseley, mayden’s-honesty, are countrey names unknown to me.” Local knowledge may have been great, but knowledge cannot be passed on using such unsystematic equipment.

Of the “wich-hazel” Aubrey was well aware that in some counties it was called “wich-elme”. To our minds it seems impossible not to go one step further and to state that the trees quite obviously are elms, and not hazels. Some such perception of natural groupings must have enabled Linnaeus to develop his genera, though he didn’t conceive of a common origin. Aubrey has only one kind of classification, which loosely equates to the species; though he can say, as of the hazel, “Wee have two sorts of them”. This would clearly pose an interesting problem if all hazels were supposed to be connected by kinship to a primordial pair (in Eden, perhaps). But I think that this was not conceived. Local varieties were probably assumed to be “just there”, their ancestry a cloud. God could have intervened many times, making special creations. In Aubrey’s time many insects were believed to emerge from inanimate material.

Considered as a whole, Aubrey’s conception of his county is rather like an account of the “wonders” that you’d find stepping through the grounds of a spacious country seat. He is anecdotal. The world in which he lived had less structure, less roads, less development, less grasp.

Dr Ralph Bathurst, Dean of Wells, and one of the chaplains to King Charles 1st, who is no superstitious man, protested to me that the curing of the King’s evill by the touch of the King doth puzzle his philosophie: for whether they were of the house of Yorke or Lancaster it did. ‘Tis true indeed there are prayers read at the touching, but neither the King minds them nor the chaplains. Some confidently report that James Duke of Monmouth did it.

Such a passage opens a window, and the view is very curious. A whole fabric of credulity is being forked over by inappropriate mental instruments. It must collapse, or retire into some more shadowy mode, such as ceremonial, but has not quite done so for Aubrey. He is prepared to record the story that woodpeckers can drive out iron nails with the help of a leaf; he reports an experiment, apparently in confirmation, and suggests that it be repeated. But John Ray impatiently cuts the traces: “without doubt, a fable”. For science is also about seeing what experiments not to bother with.  

Undoubtedly Ray’s cold clarity has given us a vast fresh field in which to roam. But I like the emphasis that Aubrey’s conceptions place on the Orcheston Grass and the Glastonbury Thorn. He is alive to individual phenomena, to the peculiarities of place. It is credulity, but it’s also an openness of mind that seems to me now an important component in our relations with nature. We need, not to “recover it”, for it was only a hint, but to find something like it.

(2002, 2003, 2014)

Aubrey's 1666 survey drawing of Stonehenge

[Image from Bodleian Library]

Molière (1622-73)

[pseud. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin]

Molière, re-imagined by Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694-1752)

You can easily read through Molière, mildly entertained, but thinking, how hackneyed all this is! When two people are at cross-purposes for pages at a time (e.g. Harpagon and Valère in Act V of L’avare), it seems a weak sort of entertainment, like a sitcom before the watershed. Then the sun shines, you feel a little more apt to join the human race, and all the jokes get deeper, they put down roots and extend into the play around them.

Scene from Tartuffe directed by Dominique Serrand, photo Michal Daniel 2006

Le Tartuffe, ou L'Imposteur (1664, revised several times to 1669)

A famous play, but the text that grew out of its difficult history is rather a bodge. Orgon seems to impose on himself, and this utter stupidity distracts from Tartuffe's power. When we eventually meet Tartuffe he seems a bit dim himself, merely a snake in the grass. The main point of the drama, Tartuffe's deception of his host, is hardly dramatized.

"Tartuffe himself is a titanic creation, one who makes our own 'Heap of Infamy' seem by comparison a mere cringing shadow" (John Wood). Strange remark. I really have a problem with seeing Tartuffe as a titanic creation. A role that doesn't appear until Act III more or less cedes any claim to be a protagonist. All we see him as is a conventional seducer. His power as a hypocrite is known only indirectly, and deceives no-one but Orgon and his mother. (Wood's allusion dates him - he is referring to Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.)

[This is a useful free Tartuffe, with introduction by Roger W. Herzel, translation by Prudence L. Steiner.

http://ptchanculto.binhoster.com/books/-Lit-%20Recommended%20Reading/Theater%20-%20Drama/Moliere_Tartuffe.pdf

]

Dom Juan: from the production by Compagnie Aigle de Sable, directed by Milena Vlach

Dom Juan (1665)

[Dona Elvira.] ... But be assured that your infidelity will not go unpunished, and that the Heaven you mock at will find means to avenge your perfidy to me!

Don Juan. Ah! Sganarelle, Heaven!

Sganarelle. Ay, ay, little we care for that! Fellows like us!

The story of Don Juan, unlike Dr Faustus perhaps, could never be other than disturbing to the orthodox. Its hero holds far too many cards, is unrepentant, courageous, a gentleman. Molière’s play was first cut, then discreetly banned, then restored in censored form, and the original cannot be fully recovered. The well-meaning Sganarelle is unable to articulate his beliefs or to persuade his master; his position and the play itself coerces him into a friendly companionship that partly depends on his own disapproval. Juan and Sganarelle are symbiotic, Juan ever outraging Sganarelle’s feelings (his outrage involving deep admiration), Sganarelle able to speak out yet always caring for his master and each giving the other a sense of who he is. Here Juan alludes gracefully to Sganarelle’s earlier sermon. Juan, by pitting himself against Heaven, makes Heaven more real, brings a little of it down to earth. His end is, perversely, saintly in its dedication, his earthly servant distressed and betrayed, not just about the wages but about their companionship. Sganarelle at last is to experience what it means to be abandoned by Juan. 

[Perhaps he sang "Days", the Ray Davies song that, like a perfectly-poised farewell card for miscellaneous occasions, remains in heart-piercing good taste no matter how you choose to understand the nature of its dear one and the dear one's departure.]

L’amour médecin (soon after Dom Juan)

Lisette. Oh, go on, you mustn’t let him have things all his own way. So long as a girl does nothing to be ashamed of she has a right to use her wits to get round her father. What does he expect you to do? Aren’t you of an age to be married? Does he think you’re made of marble? ...

L’amour médecin is a brief impromptu in three scenes, with music. Sganarelle (no connection with the previous play) is to find out what Lucinde, his daughter, is made of. When she feigns sickness the doctors are brought in. Their best moment is when, supposedly discussing the case, they discuss such professional matters as getting around Paris and the importance of not contradicting a senior. That’s only natural. As Dr Tomés says,

When a man’s dead he’s dead and that’s all it amounts to, but a point of etiquette neglected may seriously prejudice the welfare of the entire medical profession.

Death is indeed both the most serious thing and a nothing. Within the institution, you disable the user account and you recruit. Death comes sooner or later anyway. The doctors are there to manage it, not to eliminate it. In the mean time, Clitandre sallies in like the quack of all quacks and marries Lucinde under her father’s very nose. 

Jean Rochefort as Alceste in a French TV production of 1970 (Photo: Georges Chevrier / INA)

Le Misanthrope (1666)

Molière's serious comedy, in which Philinte has the positive values and

Alceste has painful ones, combined with a perverse infatuation for the delightful but distinctly unsuitable Célimène.

Le Misanthrope is a masterpiece, but is so unlike his other plays, or any other play of the period, that it gives us a sense of improvisation. It struck me that it's his Brat Pack thing, and also a bit like "The Only Way is Essex". Fly-on-the-wall is the right way to see life in Célimène's house, very splintered and unexplained, eg. those letters -we don't ever really find out who either of them is addressed to, or whether what anyone says about either of them is true. In this case observation of the unities creates a slice-of-life that is distinctively open-ended. So far as the play is a portrait of Generation X this all works out. But it leaves Alceste a bit out of the picture, and Philinte too.

Considering how tolerant Philinte is, his judgment of Célimène is a bit damning. He's jealous, don't you think? Philinte's sanity is attractive, but he doesn't get everything right. For instance he credits Arsinoé's virtue, but we see that she's an interfering old bat, even if we're also aware she doesn't quite deserve all the payback that Célimène delivers with such relish (and to our delight). Philinte is a bit too in with Eliante, who can also be sharp-tongued against her cousin. A sort of tacit distance lies between Philinte and Célimène. He is never the object of her satire. He never says anything exceptionable to her, but he listens to those who do. 

(If you think you'd do better with a less informal account, forget it. Wikipedia needs a step change on its canonical literature articles. I've seen two recently - one on "The Misanthrope", one on Joyce's "The Dead" - that seem to have been written at the back of the class by someone who didn't understand the story. Wikipedia's methods of cross-improvement based on certain ground-rules - e.g. full references, objectivity - don't apply well to literary interpretation. If someone thinks it worth while to tell us that Oronte's reaction to his sonnet being criticised reveals his low self-esteem, you can't exactly dispute it as not true; more that Oronte's character just isn't the point here. If someone claims that Gabriel fails at first to recognize his wife on the staircase - well, I feel perfectly certain that this isn't what Joyce means us to understand, but how could I objectively demonstrate it? In each case what is being revealed is that the writer isn't inward with the kind of work they're describing, not because they haven't read it but because they don't belong to the traditional literary community that the text in part projects and that in part has slowly developed through centuries of polite criticism. But is that wrong? Does one need to belong to some sort of informal club of informed readers, i.e. informed of what is loosely called the critical context, to be qualified to write the Wikipedia entry? It seems that that's in fact my level of expectation, but the grounds for it are open to question.)

Le Médecin Malgré Lui (1666)

Excellent farce, with a little too much domestic violence to be quite comfortable.

Le Sicilien, ou L'Amour Peintre (1667)

Comedy-ballet.

L’avare (1668)

Cléante. Confound it! What use is that to me?

La Flèche. Patience, please. ‘Item – three muskets, inlaid in mother-of-pearl, with three assorted rests; item – one brick furnace with two retorts and three flasks, very useful for anyone interested in distilling; item –‘

....

‘.... item – one crocodile skin three foot six inches in length and stuffed with hay, a very attractive curio for suspension from the ceiling...’

Cléante. ... The miserable rogue! Did you ever hear of such usury! Not content with charging outrageous interest, he must rook me three thousand francs for his collection of old junk...

The unnamed lender turns out to be Harpagon, Cléante’s father. Harpagon is far too comic, foolish and intelligent to be unlovable, and his relationship with his son, though they are always at loggerheads, is clearly a fond one. The liberating zest of the play (somewhat intermittent, it is true) consists of its treatment of both money and possessions as a social game, where personal peculiarities are to be observed, as in Valère’s wonderfully mealy-mouthed hypocrisies, and both truth and value are exposed as subjective. Cléante and Harpagon are in fact at one; money is worth much more as money than when translated into this alarming collection of things that someone else once thought well of.    

Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670)

M. Jourdain. The natural sciences? What have they to say for themselves?

Philosopher. Natural science explains the principles of natural phenomena, and the properties of matter; it is concerned with the nature of the elements, metals, minerals, precious stones, plants, and animals, and teaches us the causes of meteors, rainbows, will-o’-the-wisp, comets, lightning, thunder and thunderbolts, rain, snow, hail, tempests, and whirlwinds.

M. Jourdain. This is too much of a hullabaloo for me, too much of a rigmarole altogether.

This is from Act II (the first two Acts are like a sort of massive prelude to the intrigues that constitute the regular story). Jourdain is an idiot but his childlike naivety is often appealing. The distaste for natural science that he articulates so well is the same thing that makes John Aubrey, the English antiquary, defensive about his interests. The philosopher does a poor job of marketing – with the enthusiasm of the inward he overpowers Jourdain with a noisy catalogue of fascinations, and inevitably produces a “rigmarole”.

When the intrigues get going, the highpoint is during the dinner-party when Dorimène refers, very naturally, to her new diamond (Act IV). Dorante, the only person who fully knows what is going on, is momentarily not in control. Then the estimable Mme. Jourdain arrives. It’s a contrived situation, basically farcical, but at this moment Molière has four developed characters in motion at once. 

Les fourberies de Scapin (1671)

From Act I – Scapin has just entered for the first time, his character is being established:

Scapin. Well, to tell the truth, there isn’t much I can’t manage when I’m put to it... I had built up a pretty good reputation for that sort of thing, but it’s like everything else today – credit goes to anyone but those who have earned it! I got into trouble over a certain little matter, and since then I’ve sworn I’ll give it all up.

Octavio. What trouble was that?

Scapin. Just a case where the law and I didn’t see eye to eye.

Octavio. The law, was it?

Scapin. We had a bit of a difference.

Octavio. You and the law?

Scapin. Yes, they treated me badly. I was so disgusted with the way things are done nowadays, I made up my mind I’d do no more for anyone.

It sounds like one of Scapin’s dodges led to his nose being slit. Octavio’s re-iterated questions point up the mental contortions that Scapin has needed to make (and has automatically made) in order to survive being judged a criminal. The memory of these lines adds underlying steel to later scenes such as the blissful sequence of exchanges between Leander and Scapin in Act 2, with Scapin at one point proclaiming:

No, no! Don’t forgive me anything. Run your sword through my guts. I should be very glad if you would kill me.

Scapin is triumphant. He has learnt to lay his own life on the table, he even enjoys it.

Le Malade Imaginaire: Michel Bouquet as Argan

Le Malade Imaginaire (1673)

Brilliant full-length comedy-ballet, in which both doctors and patients are ridiculed.

(2005, 2011)

Bird Cherry (Prunus padus)

Here are some photos of Bird Cherry (Punus padus) when it was newly in bloom  (I took these on April 15th 2014 in West Swindon).

The trunk is smooth and grey. It does not look very like other Cherries - it lacks those familiar horizontal bands of lenticels. The racemose cherries (like this one, and Cherry Laurel, and Portugal Laurel) are a different group.

Lovely! But sometimes the Bird Cherry is spectacular in a different way, when the whole tree (and even its surroundings) become a grey-tented nursery for caterpillars of the Bird Cherry Ermine moth (Yponomeuta evonymella). Here's what I saw today (June 9th, West Swindon). Dramatic attacks like this are said to be more common in a warm spring.

The Bird Cherry Ermine moth is known as häggspinnmal in Sweden, where Bird Cherry (hägg -  Prunus padus) is valued in the woods and as a specimen tree in gardens. So it's all the more distressing when it's transformed overnight into a skeleton hung with webs. In the Finnish lyric Kanteletar 2:150, this is the nemesis that allows the humble birch to triumph over the flamboyant bird cherry:

          Tuli toukka, tuomen kaivoi,
                Kukat kaunoset kaotti.

          maggots gnawed the bird cherry
                destroyed its fair flowers...       (trans. Keith Bosley)

When the caterpillars have finished eating everything, they cocoon together in large swagbags like this.

*

By midsummer, 12 days later, things have moved on a bit. From a distance the webby trunk looks as if it's been decorated with Swan filters. These of course are the emerging moths.

They hung around, feebly fluttering onto our hands, clothes, hair and cameras, while we took useless pictures of them.

Meanwhile, the upper canopy is full of fresh new leaves. Looking skywards, the trees are almost back to normal.

*

The Bird Cherry Ermine isn't usually so devastating, though that's when we're apt to notice it. Below are a couple of overheads showing a typical low-level attack. (Photos taken June 3rd, 2015)

Here's an older post about the related Spindle Ermine.

And another post about the Orchard or Cherry Ermine.

*

Prunus padus 'Colorata'. Swindon, 16th April 2019.

Here's something I didn't know existed. This is Prunus padus 'Colorata', a variety discovered by chance in Sweden in the 1950s. (In Sweden it is called "blodhägg".)

It's propagated clonally as it doesn't come true from seed. Here in Eastleaze (West Swindon) it's growing alongside normal Bird Cherry and some of the plants look like they could be a cross between the two.

Colorata intergrowing with normal Bird Cherry

*

The native region of Prunus padus is a broad band running across N. Europe and nearly all of Russia.

In Europe there's next to no tradition of doing anything with the fruit, but it's different in Siberia, where they make "bird cherry flour" from the dried fruit. This in turn is a constituent of bird cherry cake, apparently a most delicious dessert. ForagerChef  has an article that will tell you all you need to know.

The bird cherry trees were a marvelous sight on Crooked Hill. The bushes were weighed down by the black fruit, sprinkled with last night's rain. You could pick a big bunch, toss a handful of berries into your mouth, and using your tongue to separate the flesh from the pits, cover your whole palate with a tart, sweet film. Tisha bent the bushes down to make it easier for Dasha to pick, and she squealed like a child when the rain from the branches showered down on her, creeping in under her neckline and trickling down her back. Two baskets were quickly filled. 

(Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Wild Berries (1981), Ch 4.)

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Bird Cherry Pocket (Taphrina padi). Frome, 26 May 2024.

But here's another thing that can happen to bird cherries. This is Taphrina padi, known as Bird Cherry Pocket, a fungal gall that turns the fruit into elongated sacks. On this youngish tree in Frome most of the fruit had been infected. 

Bird Cherry Pocket (Taphrina padi). Frome, 26 May 2024.

Uninfected fruit ripening on the same tree. Frome, 26 May 2024.