The cherry tree outside our door is laden with ripening fruit and a blackbird has taken up residence bang in the middle of it. When he is not positively gorging himself, he stands guard to ward off approaches from all others, especially humans. Now I am more than happy to share, but the blackbird considers the fruit to be exclusively his and becomes extremely agitated if he sees us steal any. which gives a touching insight into our place in the order of things. According to the bats, foxes, squirrels, moles, rabbits and toads who rightly think the nature reserve is theirs, we must be little more than trespassers with annoying habits!
The young creatures here are growing up very fast while the world around them signals the arrival of high summer. Long grass in the pinetum resounds to the churr-churr of innumerable grasshoppers, and the bog pond is dappled with butterflies: skippers, meadow browns and marbled whites. Overhead, comes the screech of swifts as they hunt for flies, and today,a flash of blue indicating a kingfisher on the black swan pond. Every honey bee for miles seems to have found its way to the great lime tree near the old farm yard, which is now in bloom. We should harvest some blossoms too, for fresh lime flower tea is one of the treats of summer and a soothing tonic for the nerves.
Everybody seems to know about elderflower spritzers, but linden-blossom tea remains a delicious secret. In fact it is hard to keep up with the successive harvests of the season: sorrel for soup: chive flowers, marigolds and nasturtiums to enliven a salad; blue borage flowers for summer drinks (delightful frozen into ice cubes); and rose petals in sandwiches! All have beneficial herbal properties too! Other seasonal plants inspire different uses: astringent southernwood to drive away clothes moths, and tutsan, a member of the st. john's wort family, whose leaves were traditionally pressed into Bibles as fragrant bookmarks. All can be found in the Reserve at this time of year.
These summer mornings Michael rises at 5 or five thirty and goes out for a few hours, cutting docks and thistles with his swaphook before breakfast. Apparently haymakers traditionally worked early, partly to avoid the heat of the day, but also because, as the dew dries, grasses become tougher to cut, and the same is true of weeds. The trick is to catch your them just before they flower, for then all the energy of the plants is concentrated in the leaves and they will be less likely to come back in strength. Working by hand is laborious, 
but this way he can trim round the meadow plants he wants to conserve and this year we have a wonderful profusion of wildflowers: meadowsweet and birds-foot trefoil, hardheads, clovers, vetches and in the Bog Pond, drifts of lady's bedstraw, agrimony and sticky mouse-ear. His cutting blade is honed to a lethal edge and regularly re-sharpened and this particular tool is now wafer thin, but Michael insists the vintage steel is better than anything you can buy new.
Hand cutting also spares most of the creatures living in the grass. We aspire to recreate the abundance of grassland insects that was commonplace at the beginning of the last century. 
Michael remembers assisting bug-hunters and beetle-collectors in his boyhood and our Bog Pond now gives an idea of what the countryside at large must have been like. 
This area, which is left virtually to manage itself, teams with insect life in a way altogether different from the rest of the reserve. Perhaps the proximity of water helps. Soon there will be dragonflies and damselflies and the red-spotted burnet moths which fly by day. At any rate there should be enough critters about this summer to keep naturalists, young or old, happy this summer!
No comments:
Post a Comment