Summer

by Melissa Harrison

  Like everything on Earth, space is not exempt from death. A supernova – the death of a star – explodes through space. The death is quick, taking only a few seconds, yet it is transformed into something sublime and radiant. As it releases more energy, the star’s brightness increases a hundred million times. All of its elements are thrown back into the galaxy, becoming part of the interstellar gas and dust that forms the next generation of stars. Life begins again. Without the death of a star, planets would not exist, including Earth. We have stars to thank for the unique blue and green planet we call home.

  I think of the cities too brightly polluted for the stars to be visible, and feel great loss on behalf of both stars and city. For the gaze of the moon staring down at you, and its surrounding family of stars, is a spectacle under which many children grow up without ever really seeing it. Give the gift of the stars. Whenever you can, encourage the young to look up and immerse themselves into the greater universe we’re part of. Taking notice of the galaxy is good for us. It awakens our souls.

  Emma Oldham, 2016

  July

  July 1. Full moon. Cherries begin to ripen, but are devoured by sparrows. Began to cut my meadow-hay, a good crop, one 3rd more than last year.

  July 2. The early brood of swallows are active & adroit, & able to procure their subsistence on the wing. Fresh broods come forth daily.

  July 3. Black-caps are great thieves among the cherries. The flycatcher is a very harmless & honest bird, medling with nothing but insects.

  July 5. Field-crickets are pretty near silent; they begin their shrilling cry about the middle of May.

  July 6. The bees that have not swarmed lie clustering round the mouths of the hives. Took-off the frames from the cucumrs: those under the hand-glasses begin to show fruit. Hay lies in a bad state.

  July 8. Second swarm of bees on the same bough of the balm of Gilead fir. Turned the hay-cocks which are in a bad state. Cherries delicate, Mr Grimm, my artist, came from London to take some of our finest views.

  July 9. The bees are very quarrelsome, & stung me.

  July 10. Some of the little frogs from the ponds stroll quite up the hill: they seem to spread in all directions.

  July 11. Tilia europaea. The lime blows, smells very sweetly, & affords much pabulum for bees. Footnote. Bees come & suck the cherries where the birds have broke the skin; & on some autumns, I remember they attack’d & devoured the peaches & Nect: where the wasps had once made a beginning.

  July 14. Young frogs migrate, & spread around the ponds for more than a furlong: they march about all day long, separating in pursuit of food; & get to the top of the hill, & into the N. field.

  July 16. Bees, when a shower approaches, hurry home. One hive of bees does not swarm; the bees lie in clusters at the mouth of the hive.

  July 19. Sambucus ebulus. Dwarf elder [Dane’s elder] blows. Fungi begin to appear.

  July 21. Missle thrushes bring forth their broods, & flock together.

  July 22. Bees swarm: the swarm of a swarm, which swarmed itself at the beginning of June. A neighbor has had nine swarms from four stalls [mother-hives]: two apiece from three of them, & three from one.

  July 23. Walnuts abound, but are rather small & spotted.

  July 25. Bees that have not swarmed kill their drones.

  July 26. Cut the grass in the little meadow. Hay makes well. Hops fill their poles, & throw out lateral shoots.

  July 30. Peacocks begin to moult & cast their splendid train. Total eclipse of the moon.

  Reverend Gilbert White, The Naturalist’s Journal, 1776

  The colour of July is gold. Gold now are the barley fields which cover much of Norfolk. Gold in the sheltered eyes of hares, the clambering harvest mice, the gapes of skylark chicks against the dirt. Gold the corn marigold blooms at the field’s edge, where spared the spray, gold on the backs of probing hoverflies.

  Gold, too, are the grasses in uncut meadows and verges. Not yet the sad dun of wind-torn winter but gold already with autumn, their breeding, seeding done, as the balance of the year tips – so soon? – towards shorter nights and colder. Gold in the happy ragwort flowers here, gold in the fleabane where the water sits, gold in the burnished eyes of grasshoppers singing for summer never to cease.

  By our coast there is gold in the bills of little terns, fidgeting like finger puppets over the beach, bringing silvered sand-eels to their sand-hunkered chicks. Nearby on a scrape stand yellow-legged gulls, loafing here on a summer break from the continent, their legs eponymous. Gold, among the stubbornly green reed in the fen, the flowers of yellow loosestrife and greater bird’s-foot trefoil. Gold the long-horn beetle’s wing-shields, blotched and spotted with black. Strangalia maculata, the evocative name of this bejewelled brooch of a bug.

  There is gold in people’s faces too, as they enjoy the smells, the sounds, the sights of summer, small and big. The sun has turned their arms and the backs of their necks gold, and the legs of shorts-clad children splodging through a saltmarsh past the rayless gold flowers of sea aster.

  It is here that the true treasure lies, the crock of gold: in the relationship that holidays allow our children to build with nature, the horizon-stretching freedom of the summer. Now can children build dams in streams; make shelters in the woods; crawl through bracken on their tummies; crush and smell wild garlic or sea wormwood leaves; and be free.

  Nick Acheson, 2016

  Yellow Iris

  It’s early morning

  and a woman

  from a previous

  world is wading

  up the stream.

  Very stately and

  sturdy with double-

  jointed elbows she’s

  still in her

  grave clothes,

  her crinkled three-ply

  surcoat made of

  cloth of June.

  She has one

  gold-webbed glove,

  one withered hand.

  She’s resting, considering

  her next pose,

  behind the blades

  of slatted blinds.

  Her name is

  Iris, the Rainbow,

  the messenger, the

  water’s secretary, the

  only word she

  speaks is ‘yellow’.

  Lost ghost Queen

  of the Unbetween

  it’s lovely listening

  to the burp

  of mud as

  she sinks her

  feet right in.

  Alice Oswald, 2009

  The glass orbs caught the sun and sparkled like jewels on the seashore. At first glance, it seemed as if a shipment of clear jack marbles had capsized, casting its precious cargo into the waves. Some lay on the sand, immobile and perfect, others tumbled back into the surf, glinting and gleaming as they rolled.

  The children were instantly drawn to the diamond treasure, like pirates. ‘Don’t touch them!’ I cried, for surely these strange creatures were baby jellyfish, just waiting to sting inquisitive fingers or careless toes. There were hundreds, probably thousands along the shoreline; it was hard to avoid standing on them.

  I looked more closely. Each was a perfect sphere of transparent, gelatinous life. Down its sides were delicately etched serrated lines and, in the centre, was that a mouth and a network of nerves? I concluded they had no apparent way of stinging. Like the children, I was itching to touch them, so we each oh so gently picked one up. They sparkled on the palms of our hands and, reassuringly, there was no jellyfish zap of pain.

  My daughter’s wonder quickly gave way to concern because so many of these little creatures were becoming stranded as the tide went out. The hot July sun was intense on our skin, making the sand warm to stand on. It meant that some of these little beings had lost their plump shape to become sad, squished blobs, glittering no more. ‘We must save them,’ she declared.

  With the intense industry that only children can show, they began throwing the stranded orbs out to sea. I joined them i
n their labour, but with the adult’s knowledge that it was an impossible task; for every one that glinted through the air to plop into the water, a hundred were washed back in. In the sea, about five metres out, a grey seal raised its head above the waterline, appraising us curiously before disappearing out of sight. Only the lure of ice creams could pull the children away from their vigil.

  Back home, my son, ever keen to get his hands on the iPad, suggested we find out what they were. The answer was not baby jellyfish; in fact they are totally unrelated to jellyfish. They are instead little animals sometimes known as a comb jelly or more formally, ctenophore. They are also known as sea gooseberries. That name was perfect; they did indeed look exactly like gooseberries that had been laser sculpted from glass.

  In the water, these little animals move themselves along by pulsating their serrated lines of tiny hairs, called cilia, which I had noticed. When the sea gooseberry beats its cilia, it sends iridescent shimmers along its body. Despite seeming so vulnerable and delicate on the beach that day, they are also voracious predators. They extend tentacles out from inside their bodies to catch tiny worms, fish eggs, larvae and even other sea gooseberries.

  On our trip to the beach we had expected the usual sand in the sandwiches and ice cream bribe for good behaviour. We had made sandcastles and jumped off the dunes. But then nature surprised us and reminded us of all the hidden mysteries of the sea. When you reach out your hand and risk being stung, you start to care passionately about the creatures we share our world with.

  Kate Blincoe, 2016

  If a psycho-analyst ever worked me over with a word-association test and threw out ‘summer’ for a starter, he would get an entire scenario in response.

  It is a sultry afternoon. No sun. There are big castles of alto-cumulus which press the heat down. Elms bulge with foliage over a broad lawn. Unstirred by the faintest breeze, the leaves are draped heavy-layered as blankets on a bed in winter.

  A faded rope hammock is slung between two apple trees. I’ve been mucking about in it, trying to spin it round like a chair-o-plane. Now I’m sprawled half asleep, gazing up through seaweedy greenness, thick and suffocating, to patches of light. The sky has become a pewter lid clamped heavily over the soupy stillness.

  Part of the stillness is the drone of insects, a dynamo hum, but nearest is the sawing rasp of grasshoppers in the awns where bryony scrambles out from the untidy garden hedge. There is also a thin grating call – attached to the only movement in the dream-like languor. Repeatedly a sparrow-sized bird with streaked pale breast darts out, whirligigs up to snatch a winged ant, and swoops back to its launching-pad twig.

  The scene is fixed in childhood, at an aunt’s house. Is it a mosaic of different visits? Did one moment etch itself in my mind forever as the very photogravure of mid-summer?

  I can’t tell. But that bird – a spotted flycatcher, I later knew – became for me an essential presence in the year’s high noon when gardens are overblown and stupefied with scents. Amid the torpor the flycatcher is a sprite, mousily plumaged yet whose vivacity puts a pulse of electricity through the air.

  Last autumn, I knocked together a nesting box with a shelf-shaped bowl and nailed it to the lime whose boughs fan across the grass to the mill stream. Flycatchers like a lookout on the edge of a clear hunting space. I hoped my ready-made flat might persuade a pair to spend the summer with me.

  By the middle of May none had turned up, and I forgot about it. This week through a window my eye was caught by an antic twirl of fawn wings. As if it was that moment of forty years ago returned, I watched the flycatcher corkscrew and flicker down upon a cabbage white butterfly and heard that finger-nail-scratching-glass call.

  With its catch pincered in its bill, it swished over to the lime: a little spasm of bright energy against the green lassitude where a woodpigeon was groaning with boredom.

  Since then two flycatchers are hunting over the lawn, all through the day up to the long twilight, spry air aces who seem never to muff an attack. Once that brilliant eye has fixed on a passing crane-fly, dodge though it might that crane-fly is (you might say) a dead duck.

  They are now building a nest: a furious freighting of shreds of lichen snatched from the pear trees, cobwebs plucked from under the loggia supported by the huge oak pillar which was once the axis of the dismantled mill wheel, and (what spondulicks!) combings from the dogs’ coats which had snarled up on the rose bushes.

  Where did mine come from on those fast but frail wings? Natal, possibly, or even Asia, and it will be a brief stay.

  By September’s end they, and their young, will have flown south on their ten thousand mile odyssey – such an outlay to make an English summer complete.

  Kenneth Allsop, In the Country, 1973

  Early July: the woodland was exquisite, glowing with shimmering green light and vividly animated with butterflies, ringlets and large skippers nectaring on the bramble flowers, but I barely noticed it, my heartbeat already accelerating, picking up speed with every step towards . . . the treasure. It was a hot bright morning and I began to perspire as we slogged up the path through the trees, four of us in single file with me, the initiate, bringing up the rear: the other three had seen the treasure before. Were their senses quivering with anticipation like mine? You know what? I think they probably were.

  They turned off the path then, suddenly, at some barely perceptible marker I never saw, and dived into the trackless undergrowth and I followed, stumbling across the slope and clambering over fallen trunks until eventually, deep in the woods, we came to a small fenced enclosure; and there inside it, in the dappled shade of a young beech tree, was the end of the quest: three slender stems each bearing half a dozen purplish-pink blossoms. I gazed on them, spellbound.

  Why do orchids excite us so? What is it about them that triggers, in those who begin to feel the passion for them, passion which is so extraordinary, passion which can lead not just to enchantment and delight but to covetousness, cupidity and criminal greed? I have spent a long time thinking about this and I have gradually come to believe it is because orchids are the flagbearers, the standard-bearers for one of the great revolutions in life on earth: the emergence of the flowering plants. What a remarkable revolution it was: 500 million years ago, the first plants that began to cover the land surface, which were pollinated by the wind, bore only one colour, that of their chlorophyll, green; yet about 150 million years ago, some of them began to employ insects instead of the breeze to move their pollen around, and equipped their reproductive organs with brightly-coloured petals to catch the insects’ eyes, and so, in a great outburst of beauty, flowers were born. A flower to us may be loveliness made manifest, but we should not forget that in evolutionary terms it is merely a device to attract a pollinator; and since orchids are the largest plant family, with more than 25,000 species in the wild, they have had to compete fiercely amongst themselves to devise ever more eye-catching forms and colours to entice their insect helpers, in the dim light of the rainforest, where most of them evolved.

  The result: these are the most glamorous, exotic, outlandish, beautiful blooms on earth, in the tropics, especially. I go to look at them in the glasshouses of Kew Gardens, this great cream six-pointed star from Madagascar, this pale purple bell with a yellow-orange heart from the Colombian Andes, this bizarre maroon-spotted cross from Borneo, and I see at once, these are flowers taken to the limit, they are the very epitome of florality, they are flowers set apart: they are the priestly caste of the plant kingdom.

  Britain’s orchids, with one great exception, are not riotously exotic in their beauty like their tropical cousins, yet I love them most of all, for their loveliness which is restrained: they are blooms of the temperate world, elegant spikes of tiny flowers in pastel shades, pink, cream, pale violet, pale purple, which sometimes seem to me in their understatement to be very English: plants designed by a civil servant. But they are nonetheless touched with distinction: they too are members of the priestly caste. In the meadow or on
the downs or in the woodland, they stand out. We have just over fifty species and every year, like many others, I go looking for them, burnt orchid, spotted orchid, fragrant orchid, marsh orchid, pyramidal orchid, man orchid, lady orchid, bee orchid, and my favourite, greater butterfly orchid, an enchanting slender tower of separate, small creamy blooms you find trembling in the shade. Excitement attaches to encountering every one. In their beauty they are among the great signifiers of summer, like the woodland butterfly trio of white admiral, silver-washed fritillary and purple emperor, or that other trio in the sky, the ‘summer triangle’ of the stars Altair, Deneb and Vega.

  Yet it is not just beauty which provides the allure: there is rarity too, the attraction of which seems to be hard-wired in our genes. Orchids are not just the largest plant family on earth, they are the most threatened, as a direct result of unrestrained human desire for them, and many have been driven by collectors to extinction in the wild; in Britain, several of our species, such as the military orchid, are among our least common flowers, and three head the list of our supreme rarities: the ghost orchid, the lady’s slipper and the red helleborine. The first I suppose I may never see, as it is a mysterious small pale flower which only intermittently appears, deep in the leaf litter of the woodlands: it was last seen in 2009, and before that, in 1986. The second is a celebrity: the lady’s slipper is the one British orchid which in its appearance unmistakably belongs with its tropical cousins. The flower’s lip, or central lower petal, is huge, blousy and bright banana-yellow, shaped like a shoe or a slipper or a clog – a piece of footwear, certainly – while behind, the other petals that frame it are drooping pennants of intense maroon. It is gaudy, glitzy and totally over the top, it is unique in the British flora, and not just for its looks, but for its story. For the British population of the lady’s slipper was driven by collectors to extinction’s very edge: it was reduced to one single plant, guarded in total secrecy by a small group of devoted botanists for more than sixty years, until eventually, in the 1990s, scientists at Kew learned the difficult trick of propagating it in the laboratory and it was saved: dozens of seedlings have now been planted out.