August

As the Season Turns

Ffern

Arts

4.9 • 846 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

August is the first real harvest month - so we go foraging in the ancient woodland, delving into the folklore of blackberries, elder and rowan along the way. Zoe tells a familiar tale from the herb garden, and The Breath sing 'Harvest', one of the first songs they wrote together. Our moss of the month takes us underground, while in the sky above we look out for meteors. An excerpt from Seamus Heaney's poem 'Blackberry-Picking', published by Faber in 'Death of A Naturalist' (1966), is read with the kind permission of his estate. 'As the Season Turns' is a podcast created by Ffern in collaboration with the nature writer and author of the Seasonal Almanac, Lia Leendertz. Lia is joined by novelist Zoe Gilbert and folk musicians Ríoghnach Connolly and Stuart McCallum of The Breath. Geoff Bird produces and Catriona Bolt is Ffern's in-house production coordinator. Each episode, released on the first of the month, is a guide to what to look out for in the month ahead - from the sky above to the land below. Ffern is an organic fragrance maker based in Somerset. You can learn more about Ffern's seasonal eau de parfum at ffern.co

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Fern podcast as the season turns.
0:11.8	Released on the first of each month, the episodes follow the changing landscape of the seasons,
0:17.6	from the moon and the stars to the tides in the trees.
0:23.5	I'm Leah Lane Dutz, author of The Almanac, a seasonal guide. And this podcast is a collaboration between myself and Fern,
0:30.1	makers of small batch organic perfume. I love wearing Fern, in my quest to live in tune with
0:36.6	the seasons, applying the season's perfume is a lovely little ritual that reminds me to use all my senses.
0:44.3	We hope that this brief guide to the month ahead will awaken you to the rhythms of the year and help you to settle deeper into the seasons. Names for August.
1:02.0	August in modern English, August in Scots and Ulster Scots,
1:07.0	oust in Welsh, est in Cornish, Ote in Gerrier. After Julius Caesar started the
1:16.9	Julian calendar reform and rewarded himself with a month, July, along came Augustus Caesar to
1:24.2	complete the job, and so he gave himself a month too, hence August.
1:30.4	Most of the languages of the British Isles have variants on this as their names for August,
1:36.2	including the very French out in Gerrier.
1:39.5	However, Scots Gallic Eunastal, Irish Gaelic Lunassan, and Manx Lunistin all name the month after the Gaelic Festival of Lunasa,
1:49.9	one of the four Gaelic agricultural markers of the year, along with Imelk, Beltane and Sowin.
1:57.6	In Old English, August is Weedmonath, weed month, gardeners know why.
2:04.1	In the Romany year, August was the month of the corn, Givescaro, which means that it is time for the wheat to be brought in,
2:12.4	corn having always been used as a generic term for cereal rather than meaning sweet corn.
2:20.3	The wheat harvest has long been the biggest event in the rural year. Whole rural families would move from farm to farm around
2:26.9	their village to help harvest the wheat and there are a great number of traditions associated with it.
2:33.5	This is particularly the case at the end of the harvest,
2:36.5	when a corn dolly would be made from the last sheaf cut and would keep the spirit of the corn,
	...

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