Bosky. Covered in bushes or underwood; full of thickets. Love it! Makes me want to head down to the river valley and visit some thickets now!

Maybe the earliest appearance in a book is Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “My many boskie acres, and my unshrubd downe. IV, I, 81 Ah, how I long for some boskie acres of my own!

My old favourite, Sir Walter Scott, in Lady of the Lake (which I haven’t read – but obsessively revisited Ivanhoe! Which has lots of great nature writing in it, come to think of it) says “The bosky thickets.”

This great word came into my world through Ross King’s, Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, Continue reading →