Heart's Ease

Hearts Ease

Our lawn is covered with wildflowers at the minute ... 

My favourite is Heart's Ease.   Isn't that a gorgeous name for a flower?  It's a type of tiny pansy .... And according to Wikepedia it has several names - I love "Come-and-cuddle-me" - that'll do lol

Viola tricolor, known as heartsease, heart's ease, heart's delight, tickle-my-fancy, Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me, come-and-cuddle-me, three faces in a hood, or love-in-idleness, 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_tricolor

There's an old song that mentions Hearts Ease
It's part of the Sam Henry collection collected back in the 1800s.  I sang it for a wee while ..

The song is The Apron of Flowers

I loved a young man, I loved him well
I loved him better than tongue can tell
I loved him better than he loved me
For he did not care for my companie

Now I tell you the reason why
Because he had more gold than I
But the gold will melt and the silver fly
And perhaps he'll just be as poor as I.

There is an alehouse all in this town
Where he goes in, and there sits down
And he takes a strange girl on his knee
And he tells to her what he once told me.

But there's a flower grows in this place
And some does call it the heart's ease,
And if I could but this flower find,
I would ease my heart and my troubled mind

Unto the green meadows there I'll go
And watch the flowers all as they grow
And every flower I will pull
Until I have my apron full.

The lawn really needs to be cut ... but these flowers in the grass are so pretty

We're also tortured with these ...... sycamore seedlings.    There are millions of them ... through the lawn, on the paths, in the hedges... And if you don't get the root of them out, in no time at all there's a wee tree well settled in for the duration... Little rotters... Sunshine at the minute is sycamore weeding.

Anyway, it was great to be outside for a couple of hours.

So after a lovely week out of routine, everything's back to normal again here tomorrow.   We've spent today in the studio fixing a few things from the guitar sessions last weekend and are now ready for the next bunch of musicians to come in and add their magic - hopefully the bass will be recorded on Wednesday.

And we have our next performance of the Emigrant Woman's Tale on Tuesday night in Belfast.   Looking forward to that.   Rehearsals tomorrow to refresh our memories. We got such an excellent response to our debut in Rostrevor a few weeks back.   It'll be interesting to see the differences between a city and a village audience.   I'll put a few tracks up from it to let you hear what Csilla's voice sounds like reading her lovely poems and to let you hear one or two of the songs.

Have a lovely week whatever you're doing.