Of course I took it home! -- along with some most interesting terra cotta pottery shards and several "fossilized" snaily(?)-looking things. It's all in a jar in a decorated shadow box on my shrine wall. I also have some bark from the mulberry tree in the front yard of the Keats House, as well as some dirt from underneath the tree. Of course, our famous plum tree is no longer there, but at least the mulberry tree is original to the house -- which means the Dear One may actually have touched that tree at some point during his brief stay at Brown's home. And believed me, I touched as much of that tree as possible.
I'm feeling quite excited now Ennis! As a Druid I adore trees and the fact there's an old Mulberry that lovely John touched ( of course he did- he LOVED trees- and it's delicious berries were probably those made into jellies and jams he wrote that Mrs Brawne gave him)- I long to see meet this tree. When I do, I shall ask it for a piece of its bark or a twig for my Druid altar! It will be a revered addition to the altar I can tell you!! Have you ever eaten a Mulberry? The berries are even more delicious than strawberries.
I'm sure anyone who happened to have seen me do all this must have thought I had lost my mind (again, maybe I have; maybe I don't care!!). The bark and the dirt from the house is also contained in (an archival quality) shadowbox.
A box of delights!
Last summer when I was walking around the gardens of the house (it hadn't repoened yet from the renovations work, so I couldn't GO INSIDE!!), I sat on a bench in the front yard, not far from that mulberry tree, and looking down to read from my volume of Keats's poetry, I spied several china shards stacked neatly on the grass next to a leg of the bench. They appeared to be very old and of some type of a blue willow-ware design. I wondered then, and still wonder today, if maybe they were unearthed during the landscape renovations and inadvertently left there.
That is a Victorian design if my memory serves me right- one popular with the Aesthetic art movement.
Needless to say, I added those shards to my collection, as well. My next "art" project is to incorporate those china fragments and flowers from the Heath I have sinced pressed, along with some other appropriate trinkets, into a shadowbox in Fanny's honour.
That is a great little collection!
