The heat broke in late July. Rain came. In great sheets. In misting drizzles. In grey swirls. In torrents. In floods. It has rained almost every day since.
The stream that runs down under the road and down the shoulder of the farm to the valley floor has become thunderous. Its water is clear though. Soil is not being swept off the farm.
There is a wasps nest dug into the hill. The entrance two fists wide. The edges shiny and clean. Like something steel cut a clean and discrete cylinder of clay. The wasps are busy. 30 or 40 a minute back and forth. They will be done soon. The queen will hibernate elsewhere. The workers will become, perhaps, irritable, a menace of sorts, but only if we are uncareful. Even in autumn they will not want much from us. Perhaps the badgers will take the nest by then. They sometimes do. Wasps have built nests in our mossy stone walls which badgers or foxes have pawed apart, stones tumbled down onto the road, the paper nest shredded, the protein secured.
The fox cub basks in the field by the road on a neighbours farm. The fox sleeps in amongst the sheep, feet from the grazing ewes. He wakes up to dig grubs. Sheep and fox pay each other no mind. He is a weaned young pup. The lambs are lusty and big. They have no business with each other this summer. Perhaps next. I can watch him for an hour and he will not see. When I make a noise he slips into the rushes. The green swallows him like the sea.
It has been a month of deer. I am stopped, cup in hand at the kitchen window. The stag which has picked its way delicately down through our woods now grazes and browses it the back garden not ten feet from where I stand.
There is a small herd of them here. Antlers almost full. The summers grazing shows in the proud muscle and glossy coat. We have been finding their beds in the tall rushes and the lush flag iris in the clearings in our woods.
Yesterday I saw the three stags in full strength by the lambing field gate. Five seconds from the house. Antlers pround of the hedge. Strong. Nervous pride in their flexed strut as their flanks twitched. They were not four feet from me. Grazing the gateway to the lambing field. They wheeled, turned and sprang from me powerfully. Took the fence in a bound, stopped having cleared to find me and fix me in their eye and then angled away across the forest clearfell.
We have red admirals flitting along the drive. Too fast to catch up with. They burst through the air with speed and effortlessness. A walk through the field before the quarry is made in their company. They rise from the meadow and spear the air with a graceful awkwardness.
Ravens kronk overhead. The thick beat of their wings scoops up skinfuls of sky. You know a raven is overhead. It’s wings beats the air like a drum. A solid thing in the air is a raven overhead.
Comma butterfly, here, for the first time. Their wings ragged edged and impulsive. An impossible efficiency as they zig zag with erratic precision. She rests on a buddleia bloom as I watch from the attic gable of the house then takes the hill and it’s 60 metres in what seem like three wingbeats.
Eyebright and birdsfoot trefoil are welcome now too. Trefoil we try to seed each year with some small success Eyebright has seeded itself in the field. A delicate fierceness it has. There is nothing like it. Both feed for bees. The trefoil, if it takes, a food for wasps and bargy pollinators strong enough to prise its petals apart. It is good too for the flock. High in protein, it also makes other proteins more digestible to them, and helps them break down proteins hat can cause serious illness. If we can convince it to take it might stay with care. It can persist for decades once it is taken with a field.
The honeybees work when they can but I worry. The turning weather has been like a slice of winter served cold in summer and the bees cannot gather nectar in the wetness and the wind. Nectar and pollen is rinsed from the blossoms. And the bees cannot fly in this anyway. The work of hot June that filled their hives with honey may well be squandered by the August rain. I am loath to feed them but feed them I may have to. One of the hives has died. A late swarm, it looked small. Too few bees to manage to hold. They had little comb. No honey. They could neither forage well, not protect their hive from wasps. And I suspect the queen was either taken, or could not lay. I tried to feed them, but it did not take. My children wonder at the comb we have. Dry. Clean. Empty of anything living or sweet.
August, though cold, and wet has it’s glories. But as it unfolds, I can see, quite clearly, the dead crowns of the ash trees. We have not yet seen the crescent shaped scars in the base of our trees. But is seems likely ash dieback has taken hold. Most ash trees have a fraction of the foliage I would expect. Crowns often entirely bereft of trees, the trunks beginning to discolour, large patchy swaths bare of foliage.
It is heart breaking. The hedges will develop gaps and become a broken toothed thing. This is something we knew was coming. And yet, despite knowledgeable and desperate pleading, we were allowed to continue to import non native ash into the country until eventually, we imported the disease. We are an island. A complicated island. But an island still. Had there been the will then a way might have been found to avoid it. We did not and Imported nursery ash trees from Central Europe as the disease swept in from the North. We could not, really, have given dieback a warmer welcome than we did. Forewarned with knowledge, and the experience of the Baltic countries who lost, in a decade, most of their trees, we did nothing to prevent it.
From my attic windows I can see a mature stand of Ash. Still healthy. In full leaf. Noisy with itself as it sways in the wind. The supple clean limbed branches crack and groan. The crown dizzy with the sway of itself. Green and lively and loved by many living things. A good friend is ash. It did not deserve our lack of care.
