I love to see the glossy, jewel-like, bright colours of beach glass as I walk along the seashore. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of it along the Jurassic Coast. I guess this is partly because of the great efforts to keep these beaches clean but also because people are more likely to use and throw away plastic bottles these days. Anyway, if I spot a piece, I put it in my pocket and take it home. Over time the quantity builds up enough to make an arrangement in a bowl or jar on my window sill. This is the current assortment on show. Amongst the mosaic pattern of every shade of white and green, the toffee-brown and the blue pieces stand out. The best piece has to be the heart-shaped one.
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Jessica's Nature Blog 
That is so pretty!! I too bring home seaglass when i find it. I was intending one day to wire a whole load of it together and make something cool and arty but it’s just never happened.
Have you ever found a message in a bottle?
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That would be so exciting – but no, I haven’t ever found a message in a bottle. Have you?
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I forgot to say that I once found a message in a hole in a tree – wrapped up in a clay and leaf ball – but the message was a secret that I cannot reveal, and the secret was put back where it belonged.
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No, sadly I haven’t. I look at bottles though when I see them and I have launched a few in my time.
The message in the tree is amazing, though. I have left messages in my time too; I walled up a letter in the back of the mirror of my antique dressing table (Victorian rosewood, bought at auction and restored) when we replaced the broken mirror, when I was 17, and when we’ve decorated by wallpapering we usually leave a message about who we were written on the wall before we hang the wallpaper. I’ve never found anything like that yet.
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It’s an interesting thing you have done to leave your messages for the future – I have never thought of doing that.
I do have some pictures of flotsam bottles – some with things stuck in them or on them. I’ll post them some time.
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I think it’s because I so much want to find a message that I leave them. I guess we make history bit by bit ourselves. All those letters and so on from soldiers in the wars, Anne Frank’s diary, the notes from Vindolandia Roman forts… it’s not the battles and coronations and so on that make history but the little bits and pieces of humanity’s leavings. I have a copy of Jane Austen’s letters and it makes me realise that this ephemera give the most acute insights into life….
I’ll look forward to the flotsam bottles.
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What a lovely post and also some lovely comments too – that blue heart is a priceless find. I too have found a few “secret” or perhaps I should say “private” messages around the countryside. Never in a bottle though…
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As soon as I started to read the message I found, I knew that I should not have been reading it and put back straight away. But it did make me think about the old tree in which I found it. I wondered if it was one of those special trees – like the one you mentioned and illustrated in your Welcome to Gower blog from Betty Church Wood. It was a very old hulk of a tree, maybe dead even, but with many nooks and crannies. Very interesting to look at and I took lots of pictures. I’ll see if I can find them and post them – I know it is not to do with seashore but it is ‘nature’.
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Would love to see them. Nature is nature – seaside or countryside :o) I love trees and plan on visiting some of Britain’s more famous specimens as soon as I have a little more time on my hands. I am going to start collecting sea-washed glass myself from now on too – your blog is a real inspiration :o)
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I have found the pictures. The tree was far stranger than I ever remembered. I took the photos in December 2007 somewhere in deepest Dorset. The tree was so old that I am not sure it will still be there. I will post the pics tomorrow.
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Brilliant – look forward to seeing them :o)
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Jessica, it’s so seldom that I find a piece of sea glass on the shores here. Your collection is beautiful. I especially like that turquoise colored piece. Its hue reminds me of warm sea waters.
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Would you like me to send you a few pieces?
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Jessica that would be awesome. If you placed them in a bottle with my name on a note and threw it in the sea, do you think it would find its way to Rainbow Haven Beach down the road from my house?
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