Tin of treasure

things I find in the garden (plus: country dancing, papyrus, and a Frisbee fact)

What treasure have you found lately? A nice pebble? A five-pound note in a coat you’ve not worn since February? (Or perhaps a forgotten lip balm?). Something you spotted on the pavement? ‘See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck’. The best-known version of this rhyme is, apparently:

Find a penny, pick it up

All the day you’ll have good luck

See a penny, let it lay

Bad luck will follow you all day

I never knew that second, bad-luck part. Because, presumably, I always picked up the penny, that was the only part of the rhyme we ever said as kids. Actually, I do know a second line, but it’s: ‘If you give it to a friend, then you’ll luck will never end’.

The original phrase was ‘see a pin and pick it up and all day long you'll have good luck.’ This was a reference to a pagan ritual in which a pin could be used in a good luck spell. The myth was that a dropped pin might have been used in such a spell and would provide good luck to the person who found it.

I usually love to quote Wikipedia in my posts; the quotes above, however, are from an equally interesting (if ever so slightly more narrowly focused) website: scottishcountrydanceoftheday.com. I got waylaid in writing this post because of looking at their amazing dance diagrams, e.g., for the ‘Penny Dance’. Works of art!

I’m taking a risk sharing that link mid-post; will you come back here or are you now going to put me aside to practise the Penny Dance? I wouldn’t blame you.

At an event I went to last month (the annual Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading conference), we were (for reasons I can’t now remember) chatting about ceilidhs and country dancing. A week or so later, I was telling an editing friend about how I thought I was being targeted by barn-dancing ads both online and irl (on Instagram and via posters on our local community noticeboard) … and now here I am writing about it. It shows how impossible it is to escape the path in life chosen for you by the country-dancing gods.

But that’s not what I intended to write about today. I’ve led us up the garden path when what I wanted to do was … lead us up an actual garden path. When I started this Substack space at the beginning of the year, one of the subjects I wanted to share with you was ‘things I find in the garden’. And while I imagine this specific promise won’t be the sole reason that you’re reading my words, I nevertheless feel a little guilty that we’re into the tenth month and I’ve not yet shared a single gardeny thing.

By the way, I did check just now if ‘gardeny’ is a word, and Merriam-Webster says yes:

Screenshot from Merriam-Webster online dictionary entry for ‘gardeny, adjective | gar·​deny ˈgärd(ᵊ)nē | : suggestive of a garden | a real gardeny place to shut out the gales | — Sinclair Lewis’

What a great quoted use of it. I also looked ‘gardeny’ up in the OED, and Oxford says no to gardeny but yes to ‘tea-gardeny’, meaning ‘resembling, or having the style of, a tea-garden’. How British.

Anyway, it’s not because I haven’t found anything in the garden worth sharing with you; it’s the opposite. I find so many interesting (to me) things that I am in the process of collating them into a zine/artist’s book of treasure, and so I think I’ve been holding back on sharing too much of it before then – you know when you share an idea, and it can take all the magic out of it? However, it’s got far enough along now that the magic is (I hope) safely embedded, so I’m going to start an occasional show-and-tell on here of some selected treasures from my garden.

No sooner had I made the decision to share than two things nearly changed my mind. I was listening to one of the latest London Review of Books podcast episodes about how ‘archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred lines from two lost plays by Euripides’. Pretty big find. How could my collection of cracked crockery compare?

An aside: googling papyrus also introduced me to another cool diagram:

Different ways of cutting papyrus stem and making of papyrus sheet. Three triangle shapes at the top of the image show three different construction methods: in rows, in segments, and in a spiral. Below these, a diagram illustrating a crisscrossing of papyrus to create a strong flat sheet. Image from WikiCommons.

While I was listening, I was also social-media scrolling and a post appeared in my Instagram feed from Time Team, introducing a new member, Meg Russell. Meg’s best find? ‘An Iron Age Jetty’.

timeteamofficial

A post shared by @timeteamofficial

Cool, cool. But has Meg ever found half a plastic bread-bag tie? As I’d already written a thousand words of this post so far, I decided I may as well press on and share the first of my small-fry finds¹ (actually my most recent find, but the one I’m sharing first here).

By ‘finds’ I’m talking about inanimate objects. Of course, there are plenty of incredible living treasures. And some unwelcome ones. What I discover the most of in my garden is, unfortunately, ground elder. For three years² I’ve weeded and weeded it; I’ve been at war with it; I’ve even written poems about it. The lawn started off as ten per cent grass and thirty per cent moss and the rest creeping buttercup and ground elder. Then, last week, via a foraging workshop/walk I went on, I learnt that all this time, I could have been eating it!

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I found a perfect (and ground-elder-free) lawn, in the shape of … a fake one:

My left hand (with an orange-nail-varnished thumbnail) holding up a green Lego ‘lawn’ baseplate, against the background of a wooden-clad wall

This is my second-ever discovery of Lego in the garden, both of which have made me laugh out loud. I often find other toys as well, because I live next to a school playground, and things frequently get chucked over the fence. Here’s a small selection of the things I found when we very first moved in:

Assorted playground equipment, quite grubby, lined up in a row: yellow novelty flying disc, green football, black beanbag, green hoop/ring thing, smallish red ball, and a smaller-still yellow ball with textured/dimpled diamond surface, the pattern of which can be seen in the print it has left across the paving slab.

Subsequently all returned to the school. ‘Fun’ fact: Frisbee is a tricky word in the editing world (and it’s surprising how often it crops up). It’s a trademarked term (owned by Wham-O !), so you’re supposed to instead use ‘novelty flying disc’ for anything that’s not actually an official Frisbee³. Hmm. The same applies to Slip‘n Slide and also Hula Hoop, or rather a ‘plastic hoop toy’ (I’ve found a big yellow Hula in the hedge before too). And the same applies to Lego. Gotta use that capital L.

I look forward to sharing more garden finds with you from my tin of treasure. Here’s a sneak peek of the contents. How pleased was I when I saw that the Lego lawn was a perfect fit!

An old orange Jacob’s Cream Crackers tin containing various bits of broken pot, coloured glass (including brown glass, hidden in the shadowy bottom-right corner), some metal ‘junk’ including a caster wheel and a nail, a coin, a pin badge, some bits of bone, a button, and a Lego head partly painted red. The Lego ‘lawn’ fits perfectly in the tin’s hinged lid.

See you next week. I hope this gloomy drizzle lifts!

1. In fact, one of the finds I’ve made was interesting enough to contact our local Finds Liaison Officer about … more on that another time.

2. Not continuously. Imagine!

3. A fact I was reminded of via a Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading conference session by editor Laura Poole