Life in the creeper

One of the hand made plaques, produced by a local artist that frame the front door, framed by the creeper.

We can never be too sure when the creeper arrived that gently embraces our home. Certainly our old barn at Ednovean Farm, looked pristine and almost too new when we had finished the renovation back in 1991. But one day perhaps by accident, perhaps by stealth, perhaps by a seed causally discarded from a passing bird, the creeper arrived. Slowly it has crept up the building, gently becoming part of our consciousness like a familiar ornament seen but not seen always in the same place. With great tact the verdant ivy has staked her claim to our home, growing in vigour with each passing year. Each glossy, triangular leaf reflecting a small disk of light back into the cosmos, shimmering and rustling in the wind.

She has a life of her own this creeper at Ednovean Farm, colonies of birds that squabble in the depths - humble house sparrows with wings industriously beating, in a smooth brown blur of motion, as they hunt a choice insect or berries from the creepers heart. The tiny wrens that return each night to roost tucked against the warm honeyed granite of our home, that was quarried from the cliffs just beyond Perranuthnoe village that lays in the valley below. And the even tinier Gold crests hoping busily about in an eternal industry of avian housekeeping.

The creepers conquest is now complete holding the barn in a sure embrace in steely defiance. We have to trim its boundaries at least twice a year now, to prevent it taking over the house all together together, so sure now of her victory as she sends out her searching tendrils towards the windows, doors and roof in an effort to finally obliterate the building and make natures conquest complete. But not yet, not yet because this is where I live too, in the honeyed barn with the shimmering clothing of creeper in the far south west of Cornwall.