I dropped down beneath an ash tree. My hair was wet at the nape, and my back was soaked with sweat. What a multitude of mirrors there are in the world! Each blade of grass seemed to catch the sun and toss it back to the sky. Big white clouds were pressing overhead and beneath them crossed electric blue damselflies, always in pairs and sometimes glued into a wincing knot. After a while, my brain cooled down. I sat up and drank some water and ate a slice of cheese. As I chewed, a movement at the field’s edge caught my eye. A wave of golden air was working its way down the meadow, wheeling as it went. It moved like smoke, a persistent, particulate cloud made up of flakes of tumbled gold. Pollen. It was June; too late for alder and hazel, too late for willow. I weighed up the options: nettle or dock, plantain, oilseed or rape or – but it was less likely – pine. A pollen grain is identified by its architecture and ornamentation; it can be porous or furrowed, smooth or spiked. Plantain pollen is covered in verrucas; the pollen of golden rod bristles all over like a miniaturised pineapple. Echinate is the technical term for this latter design, meaning prickly, from echinos, the Greek for hedgehog.
Pollen is designed to drift. The tiny grains – hundreds of thousands in a single pinch – often have air sacs to help them float, as waterwings buoy a swimmer. These grains can travel great distances. In 2006 residents in East Anglia and Lincoln-shire reported a pollen that covered cars and could be tasted on the air. It had come across the North Sea from Scandinavia and was seen on satellite pictures as a vast cloud: a yellow-green plume sweeping the coast, as the BBC report put it. Scientists identified it as birch pollen, the product of a wet April and sunny May in Denmark, though crop fires in western Russia may have contributed to the dust.
I leaned back and watched the cloud come. It could have crossed oceans, though it seemed more likely that it had risen from the neighbouring field, where coppery dock and nettle grew tangled amid the grasses. Didn’t Plato think there was a wind that could impregnate horses? It couldn’t have been more fertile than this generative swarm, twelve feet long and a yard wide, that rolled towards the waiting flowers.
Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, 2011
Each season brings its magic, and summer’s begins in the last week of June, as meadow flowers begin to weave a tapestry of subtle colour through fine meadow grasses.
In a local wildflower meadow, ox-eye daisies sway in the breeze. Their beautiful local name of ‘moon daisy’ describes them perfectly, for the yellow centre looks like the moon rising from its surrounding white petals. The name delights the children I tell this to, as I was delighted when my mother told me as a child. And it’s not only children who enjoy the ox-eye daisies. I have watched fox cubs playing among them and occasionally pouncing on them as if they are prey.
Bird’s-foot trefoil, known locally as Tom’s Thumb, is also a delight with its bright, dainty yellow flowers and one thumb-like petal that inspired its name, the more so when a common blue settles on one of these fairytale flowers to sup nectar (an important primary food plant for this butterfly).
Threaded among these flowers are ribbons of yellow rattle, a semi-parasitic plant that feeds on the roots of meadow grasses, keeping them from densely covering the meadow so that wildflowers can set seed. I love the soft flower heads of Yorkshire fog grass with their haze of pink here and there, and which, together with cocksfoot meadow grasses, are important larval food plants for a number of our butterfly larva.
A few days later among the grasses I find a field vole in a burrow and watch it scuttle across the burrow’s entrance below ground. Then, walking quietly and softly along the path, I spot a basking grass snake, easily identified by its yellow collar, which is doubtless lying in wait for one of the many toads that inhabit this meadow. It slithers away as quickly and smoothly as ribbon across silk when it senses my presence.
A green woodpecker is feeding on ants on one of the anthills but it spots me and flies off with its ‘yaffle’ signal. As I am admiring it, my attention is caught by a kestrel ahead of me, hovering over and then diving onto an unsuspecting small mammal which it captures and carries away. Towards dusk, I have watched barn owls catching bank voles and field voles here, too, reminding me of the countless species that benefit from wildflower meadows. A black, scimitar-winged bird flies swiftly past, scooping up insects low over the meadow. One of the glorious, uplifting sights of summer has passed within a whisker, and more swifts follow. I cannot imagine anything more beautiful or uplifting.
Greater and common knapweed are striking flowers that attract good numbers of marbled white butterflies, which will also sip nectar from the many florets of delicate field scabious. Meadow brown butterflies also vie to win the nectar of a particular flower.
The flowers also attract feisty Essex skipper butterflies who defend ‘their’ flowers from bumblebees. It’s an impressive and determined stand from such a small butterfly towards a bumblebee. It’s only female bumblebees that sting; can skipper butterflies tell the difference between male and female bees, I wonder?
Not far away an organic arable farm is impressively managed for wildlife and has a wildflower field margin. Here, there are at least four nesting pairs of skylarks, and as I arrive there in mid July, I hear their unmistakeable joyful summer song as they fly skywards. I kneel down to take a closer look at the small white flowers and delicate leaves of hedge bedstraw alongside a hedge. As I look, a shape moves from the crop into the grassy mown track which separates it from the field margin just a few feet away. It’s a hare – so close that I can see its beautiful soft brown eyes, large ears with the distinctive black-topped tips and those large, powerful legs which allow it to run at speeds of up to forty-five miles an hour. It comes so close that I can no longer keep the camera in focus as I take photographs of it.
At home, an orchard meadow has replaced my lawn. It gives me constant surprises, such as finding, for the first time this year, a small copper butterfly on the wild marjoram there, and a beautiful wool carder bee on purple toadflax, which was sown by the wind from the flower border. Now that these essential native wildflowers and meadow grasses are all but lost in the countryside, our gardens can provide vital habitats. Unlike a lawn my meadow only has to be mown from July or August onwards until December, – three times at most. Surely, that alone must tempt you to transform part of your lawn into a wildflower or orchard meadow!
Jo Cartmell, 2016
Summer, June summer, with the green back on earth and the whole world unlocked and seething – like winter, it came suddenly and one knew it in bed, almost before waking up; with cuckoos and pigeons hollowing the word since daylight and the chipping of tits in the pear-blossom.
On the bedroom ceiling, seen first through sleep, was a pool of expanding sunlight – the lake’s reflection thrown up through the trees by the rapidly climbing sun. Still drowsy, I watched on the ceiling above me its glittering image reversed, saw every motion of its somnambulant waves and projections of the life upon it. Arrows ran across it from time to time, followed by the far call of a moorhen; I saw ripples of light around each root of the bulrushes, every detail of the lake seemed there. Then suddenly the whole picture would break into pieces, would be smashed like a molten mirror and run amok in tiny globules of gold, frantic and shivering; and I would hear the great slapping of wings on water, building up a steady crescendo, while across the ceiling passed the shadows of swans taking off into the heavy morning. I would hear their cries pass over the house and watch the chaos of light above me, till it slowly settled and re-collected its stars and resumed the lake’s still image.
Watching swans take off from my bedroom ceiling was a regular summer wakening. So I woke and looked out through the open window to a morning of cows and cockerels. The beech trees framing the lake and valley seemed to call for a Royal Hunt; but they served equally well for climbing into, and even in June you could still eat their leaves, a tight-folded salad of juices.
Outdoors, one scarcely knew what had happened or remembered a
ny other time. There had never been rain, or frost, or cloud; it had always been like this. The heat from the ground climbed up one’s legs and smote one under the chin. The garden, dizzy with scent and bees, burned all over with hot white flowers, each one so blinding an incandescence that it hurt the eyes to look at them.
The villagers took summer like a kind of punishment. The women never got used to it. Buckets of water were being sluiced down paths, the dust was being laid with grumbles, blankets and mattresses hung like tongues from the windows, panting dogs crouched under the rain-tubs. A man went by and asked ‘Hot enough for ’ee?’ and was answered by a worn-out shriek
In the builder’s stable, well out of the sun, we helped to groom Brown’s horse. We smelt the burning of his coat, the horn of his hooves, his hot leather harness, and dung. We fed him on bran, dry as a desert wind, till both we and the horse half-choked. Mr Brown and his family were going for a drive, so we wheeled the trap into the road, backed the blinkered horse between the shafts, and buckled his jingling straps. The road lay deserted in its layer of dust and not a thing seemed to move in the valley. Mr Brown and his best-dressed wife and daughter, followed by his bowler-hatted son-in-law, climbed one by one into the high sprung trap and sat there with ritual stiffness.
‘Where are we goin’ then, Father?’
‘Up the hill, for some air.’
‘Up the hill? He’ll drop down dead.’
‘Bide quiet,’ said Mr Brown, already dripping with sweat, ‘Another word, and you’ll go back ’ome.’
He jerked the reins and gave a flick of the whip and the horse broke into a saunter. The women clutched their hats at the unexpected movement, and we watched them till they were out of sight.
When they were gone there was nothing else to look at, the village slipped back into silence. The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger.
We sat by the roadside and scooped the dust with our hand and made little piles in the gutters. Then we slid through the grass and lay on our backs and just stared at the empty sky. There was nothing to do. Nothing moved or happened, nothing happened at all except summer. Small heated winds blew over our faces, dandelion seeds floated by, burnt sap and roast nettles tingled our nostrils together with the dull rust smell of dry ground. The grass was June high and had come up with a rush, a massed entanglement of species, crested with flowers and spears of wild wheat, and coiled with clambering vetches, the whole of it humming with blundering bees and flickering with scarlet butterflies. Chewing grass on our backs, the grass scaffolding the sky, the summer was all we heard; the cuckoos crossed distances of chains of cries, flies buzzed and choked in the ears, and the saw-toothed chatter of mowing-machines drifted waves of fair from the fields.
We moved. We went to the shop and bought sherbet and sucked it through sticks of liquorice. Sucked gently, the sherbet merely dusted the tongue; too hard, and you choked with sweet powders; or if you blew back through the tube the sherbet-bag burst and you disappeared in a blizzard of sugar. Sucking and blowing, coughing and weeping, we scuffled our way down the lane. We drank at the spring to clean our mouths, then threw water at each other and made rainbows. Mr Jones’s pond was bubbling with life, and covered with great white lilies – they poured from their leaves like candle-fat, ran molten, then cooled on the water. Moorhens plopped, and dabchicks scooted, insects rowed and skated. New-hatched frogs hopped about like flies, lizards gulped in the grass. The lane itself was crusted with cow-dung, hard baked and smelling good.
We met Sixpence Robinson among the bulrushes, and he said, ‘Come and have some fun.’ He lived along the lane just past the sheepwash in a farm cottage near a bog. There were five in his family, two girls and three boys, and their names all began with S. There was Sis and Sloppy, Stosher and Sammy, and our good friend Sixpence the Tanner. Sis and Sloppy were both beautiful girls and used to hide from us boys in the gooseberries. It was the brothers we played with: and Sammy, though a cripple, was one of the most agile lads in the village.
Theirs was a good place to be at any time, and they were good to be with. (Like us, they had no father; unlike ours, he was dead.) So today, in the spicy heat of their bog, we sat round on logs and whistled, peeled sticks, played mouth-organs, dammed up the stream, and cut harbours in the cool clay banks. Then we took all the pigeons out of their dovecots and ducked them in the water-butt, held them under till their beaks started bubbling them threw them up in the air. Splashing spray from their wings they flew round the house, then came back to roost like fools. (Sixpence had a one-eyed pigeon called Spike who he boasted could stay under longest, but one day the poor bird, having broken all records, crashed for ever among the cabbages.)
When all this was over, we retired to the paddock and played cricket under the trees. Sammy, in his leg-irons, charged up and down. Hens and guinea-fowl took to the trees. Sammy hopped and bowled like murder at us, and we defended our stumps with our lives. The cracked bat clouting; the cries in the reeds; the smells of fowls and water; the long afternoon with the steep hills around us watched by Sloppy still hid in the gooseberries – it seemed down here that no disasters could happen, that nothing could ever touch us. This was Sammy’s and Sixpence’s; the place past sheepwash, the hide-out unspoiled by authority, where drowned pigeons flew and cripples ran free; where it was summer, in some ways, always.
Summer was also the time of these: of sudden plenty, of slow hours and actions, of diamond haze and dust on the eyes, of the valley in post-vernal slumber; of burying birds out of seething corruption; of Mother sleeping heavily at noon; of jazzing wasps and dragonflies, haystooks and thistle-seeds, snows of white butterflies, skylarks’ eggs, bee-orchids, and frantic ants; of wolf-cub parades, and boy scouts’ bugles; of sweat running down the legs; of boiling potatoes on bramble fires, of flames glass-blue in the sun; of lying naked in the hill-cold stream; begging pennies for bottles of pop; of girls’ bare arms and unripe cherries, green apples and liquid walnuts; of fights and falls and new-scabbed knees, sobbing pursuits and flights; of picnics high up in the crumbling quarries, of butter running like oil, of sunstroke, fever, and cucumber peel stuck cool to one’s burning brow. All this, and the feeling that it would never end, that such days had come for ever, with the pump drying up and the water-butt crawling, and the chalk ground hard as the moon. All sights twice-brilliant and smell twice-sharp, all game-days twice as long. Double charged as we were, like the meadow ants, with the frenzy of the sun, we used up the light to its last violet drop, and even then couldn’t go to bed.
When darkness fell, and the huge moon rose, we stirred to a second life. Then boys went calling along the roads, wild slit-eyed animal calls, Walt Kerry’s naked nasal yodel, Boney’s jackal scream. As soon as we heard them we crept outdoors, out of our stifling bedrooms, stepped out into moonlight warm as the sun to join our chalk-white, moon-masked gang.
Games in the moon. Games of pursuit and capture. Games that the night demanded. Best of all, Fox and Hounds – go where you like, and the whole of the valley to hunt through. Two chosen boys loped away through the trees and were immediately swallowed in the shadow. We gave them five minutes, then set off after them. They had churchyard, farmyard, barns, quarries, hilltops, and woods to run to. They had all night, and the whole of the moon, and five miles of country to hide in. . . .
Padding softly, we ran under the melting stars, through sharp garlic woods, through blue blazed fields, following the scent by the game’s one rule, the question and answer cry. Every so often, panting for breath, we paused to check on our quarry. Bullet heads lifted, teeth shone in the moon. ‘Whistle-or-’OLLER! Or-we-shall-not-FOLLER!’ It was a cry on two notes, prolonged. From the other side of the hill, above white fields on mist, the faint fox-cry came back. We were off again then, through the waking night, among sleepless owls and badgers, while our quarry slipped off into another parish and woul
d not be found for hours.
Round about midnight we ran them to earth, exhausted under a haystack. Until then we had chased them all through the world, through jungles, swamps, and tundras, across pampas plains and steppes of wheat and plateaux of shooting starts, while hares made love in the silver grasses, and the hot large moon climbed over us, raising tides in my head of night and summer that move there even yet.
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie, 1959
I leave the sleepy village of half a dozen houses and head off over the stile, following a small path which rises steeply through lush grass and fresh bracken stems. It’s muddy and in damper conditions would be ankle deep and slippery, but today it’s baked dry, pitted with the hooves of livestock. A thin layer of high cloud softens the fierceness of the Scottish sun, and skylarks pour out their song as they hang in the air, then flutter to earth.
The sea has just come into view, shimmering, blue, calm, expansive. I pause for breath and pick up the perfume of gorse, marvelling at the vibrant yellow flowers packed so tightly between the prickles.
I climb up the cliff, following the path which soon levels out, leaving the gorse bushes behind. I am surrounded by flowers and serenaded with birdsong. The path meanders up and down the folds in the landscape, and with the sea on my right I look for a place to rest. Most of the ground is too steep and stony for comfort, but eventually my search is rewarded. Moving a protruding briar and a couple of stones I get out the thermos. Butterflies flit from flower to flower, while a nearby rock pipit furiously protests that I have invaded his patch.
From this point there is a wide arc of deep blue sparkling sea visible, the horizon hidden in heat haze. About thirty metres below me I can see a stretch of beach and hear the waves lapping the rocks. A pair of oystercatchers fly past, skimming the water and scolding loudly, their bright red beaks and black and white plumage glinting in the sun. Some terns arrive, screeching with excitement as they dive into the sea, then fly up again before the water droplets have settled.
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