New Generation Thinkers: Sloe Time

Sunday Feature: Sloe Time

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Sunday Feature: New Generation Thinkers: Sloe Time

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, New Generation Thinkers: Sloe Time

Nature's barbed wire - and giver of a fruit that creates a delicious warming tipple.

The widow maker and defender of fields - Lisa Mullen invites Robert McFarlane and Sam Robinson to join her in evoking the charms and spiky dangers of the humble blackthorn.

Lockdown encourages us to keep local, but for many this has been rewarded with a new take on the close-by, the ordinary, in the natural world (even as nature is wreaking havoc) - such as the humble blackthorn.

New Generation Thinker Dr Lisa Mullen is fascinated by the beauty, cruelty and danger inherent in the blackthorn - flowers, spikes and fruit – the sloes whose alien green flesh dries the mouth, but combines with gin to make the perfect winter drink. 

Not a ‘charismatic mega – fauna’, like the Giant Redwood, blackthorns dense, strong, dark wood, rippling with veins of toffee, plays an important role in holding our countryside together; dividing fields, feeding us  and delighting in being one of the first to blossom in spring.

“A dense thicket, bristling with spines - you realise why blackthorn was used defensively as a dead hedge by the Saxon’s, the true precursor of barbed wire.”    Roger Deakin 

Blackthorn’s physical characteristics make it a popular baddie - folk lore depicts it as dangerous as well as useful. Robert McFarlane - a passionate advocate for nature – even describes the blackthorn as “the widow maker” - for its easily infected wounds. 

Reliving childhood adventures in the Chiltern’s, pretending to be the princess in the thorny bush, Lisa recalls dangerous, warning stabs from the blackthorns cruel spikes.  She talks to Samuel Robinson, coppicer and woodsman, who knows the blackthorn better than most. For Lisa he sings a beautiful song about the blackthorn winter, the false spring, his dog’s violent encounter with a deer, and his own confrontation with death.   

Producer: Sara Jane Hall
Music by Samuel Robinson -  ‘Blackthorn’ -  featuring Hannah Flynn
https://samrobinson.bandcamp.com/
And “Walking on Black Meadow” by The Soulless Party

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