Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

Author:Roger Deakin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141900254
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

8th July

Sunny morning after rain. I find a pale blue self-heal in Cowpasture Meadow. Thistles are in flower, and bees setting up a real hum in the pools of white clover.

I pick the blackened pods of creeping vetch and crack them open to release the seed, which I sow in the hedge.

4 p.m. A flower bramble. A bramble in full flower is a great joy to see. The bramble I’m observing is in one corner of my garden, and its flowers are pale pink. It belongs to the tribe of silver-backed leaves, and the joy of it is the great multitude of insects it attracts. There’s a party, a feast, going on here.

Dozens of butterflies skip about from flower to flower. Apart from the occasional comma, they are all meadow browns and ringlets. The ringlets, dusky-winged and eyed around the borders, open and shut their wings as if to wink. Bumblebees and hoverflies of every kind are humming and busying themselves from flower to flower, the bees rummaging amongst the stamens at a great rate, working with urgent efficiency. The whole bramble bush hums and pulsates with its insects. Behind it, in the denseness of the hedge, a pair of blackbirds fret and cluck over my presence. The coquettish ringlets hardly open their wings except to fly, folding them tightly shut the second they land, only occasionally relaxing them in the ecstasy of nectar.

A tiny spider drops out of the leaves and walks purposefully across my page. Not one of these insects wastes a moment on squabbling over a flower or jostling for position; instead there’s a kind of dance as each forager gives way to the other. ‘After you’, they seem to say. A blackcap sings sweetly somewhere offstage. And the infuriating, unhappy, neurotic dogs across the field, cooped up in a cage all day, bark incessantly, miserably.

The six eyes of the ringlet and the single eye of the meadow brown are all camouflage, like the fearsome-looking black and yellow stripes of the hoverflies, mimicking the wasps that should be on this blossom too, but aren’t. Wasps have become a rarity round here. Only hornets are relatively plentiful. Some of the hoverflies even gyrate their abdomens sexily, as if itching to sting. I spot hive bees and at least three or four different kinds of bumblebee.

All along the hedges of Cowpasture Meadow I hear chiffchaffs, grasshoppers in the field, wind in the tops of the ash, elm and crab apples.

The shed where the foxes live is completely hidden by a towering bramble, a castle really, animated all over this afternoon in the sunshine by butterflies, bees and hoverflies feasting and ravishing its recently opened pink blossom.

Within each flower, in the exploding crown of stamens at the centre of its five pink petals, is a little colony of tiny black shiny beetles, pollen beetles, all busy feeding themselves stupid, their iridescent wing cases glinting blue, green and purple-black in the sun. All round each open flower a dozen more buds are balled up in tight fists, ready to open any day now.

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