I am standing in a meadow, far from the noise of traffic and people, and in the breeze the tall willows that border the field flicker and clatter their leaves for me, the sound of a distant waterfall where there is no water. Two branches of beech, grown too closely together, bang an erratic accompaniment to the steady bagpipe drone of hoverflies visiting the early blackberries. The soft heads of the grasses, the timothy and Yorkshire fog, whisper to each …
Category: insects
I watch as two invaders to our shores play a deadly game It is one of those September afternoons that you always hope for: a bright, warm sun traversing low in a sky of faded blue, adorned with suds of grey-white cloud, and a gusting breeze. A narrow path leads me between stands of bramble to an open area of long grass, and almost at once I see it, low down between the stems. It is hard to miss. It …
Ravensroost wood, Wiltshire. For all the effort that I put into it, I can never get successional flowering to work in my garden. Yet here in the woodland, it happens automagically; not just seasonally, but from year to year as well. This time last year, it was the hemp agrimonies that dominated, their clusters of pink-purple flowers festooned with nectaring hoverflies and the occasional white-letter hairstreak butterfly dropping in from the wych elms behind. This year, the hemp agrimony is …
Ravensroost wood, Wiltshire Inevitably, it rained. In the summer that has been no summer, on the day of the Wimbledon and European Cup final, the wood sat brooding and silent, caught in a long exhale, even the birds subdued into near silence. There was a tension to the air, a sense of sense of expectation, and I had barely set foot past the gate when the rain began. Desultory stuff, an unambitious but persistent drizzle, the grasses bowing before me, …
I fulfilled a small ambition yesterday. I have for some time tried to find and photograph the Brilliant Emerald dragonfly. It ‘s a Ronseal insect, doing exactly what it says on the tin: it is brilliantly emerald. So, since the weather has finally graced us with something other than rain, I thought I’d give it another go. It’s an acid pool lover, so if you want to see it your options are limited to Scotland, or to a cluster of …
The glade smells of baking ground and dried bracken, cut with the faint sweetness of end-of-year-sale bluebells. Their last few nodding heads are just visible between the unfurling green shepherd’s crooks of new ferns, and the squat purple flowers of bugle. Spindly birches cast ripples of dappled shade across the ground, but in this glade, surrounded on all sides by taller, more mature forest, the heat of this beautifully sunny day is trapped. It is uncomfortably warm. As I stand …
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