Ants in the bathroom...

It's funny the things that one remembers from summer to summer, and the things one so easily forgets.
For instance, I always remember July and August as being one long spell of blazing hot days, but I forget about the still-frequent rain, and the chill that often comes in the evenings. I forget that when the blazing hot days do come, they often bring hot, sticky nights with them, when no matter how many times one turns one's pillow over and about, it's impossible to find a cool spot.
I forget that the garden goes quiet for a month, as the exhausted parent birds stop their singing, and hide amongst the undergrowth until their moulting feathers have regained something of their former glory. And I forget about the ants in the bathroom...

Summer!

Summer is here at last. We thought it would never come...

The mornings dawn bright and clear, and the deep blue sky stretches above us, uninterrupted by cloud, from morning till night. For some curious reason I am reminded of school sports day, though I can't imagine the weather was always so perfect as this.

But though we have no rain, the grass is still wet every morning from the heavy dew. As I did my garden chores this morning I kicked up my feet for sheer joy, and great showers of droplets flew out from the end of my shoes, and sparkled in the sunshine. When I looked down I saw little silvery spiders' webs in amongst the grass, twinkling as though they were spun from jewels...

Summer Not Found - Please Try Spain

After the wettest June since records began, one might have hoped that July would pull its socks up. Faint hope. We are just half way through the month, and already it has been even wetter than June.

But enough about depressing things, like the non-existent English summer! Let us talk of more cheerful topics: such as, that the baby robins are back again, with their centrically-expanding red breasts; and yesterday morning I saw what was either a baby wren or a baby gold crest hiding from the rain in the creeper above my bedroom window. The purple honey-scented buddleia is slowly coming into bloom, a clump of pink hollyhocks is growing up out of the midst of the rhubarb plant, and we have recently spotted some beautiful butterflies (species unidentified) in the garden. So life is still good! It will take more than a washed-out summer to dampen these hardened British spirits...

For a reliable weather forecast, ask the house martins...

June was over all a pleasant month - rather wet it is true (apparently the wettest since records began), but we were also treated to some blazing sunshine and brilliant blue skies. Had it not been for the strong winds, a few of the days might even have been called perfect summer weather!

I discovered something rather interesting recently. I had often heard it said that low-flying swallows are a sign of coming rain, though the clear blue skies and uninterrupted sunshine of the succeeding days clearly belied the tale; but the other day I read that this old wives' tale actually applies to house martins. It is they who swoop lower for the insects who are trying to escape the cold upper air - swallows just fly low whenever they feel like it. So when I was out walking yesterday, along the edge of a broad bean field, and I saw the house martins all around me flying as low as they possibly could, I thought I had better turn back. And sure enough, just as I reached the gate onto the road, the droplets began to fall...

"We're all going on a Summer Holiday..."

"We're all going on a Summer Holiday, no more working for a week or two;

fun and laughter on our summer holiday,

no more worries for me or you -

for a week or two..."

 

                                                                  

Towards the end of May my parents and I (and the dog) went over to our house in France for a fortnight's holiday.

Cow parsley, buttercups and pink roses

We arrived to find the verges up to my waist in cow parsley (to be strictly accurate it was Burnett Saxifrage, but it looks like cow parsley), and tall golden buttercups. The drive was liberally bespeckled with leggy daisies so overgrown that they wobbled, and bobbed around in the breeze; and there were roses everywhere. They grew up the sides of the house, and tumbled down over the barn; they crept sideways along the walls, their buds peeping out here and there through a tangled mass of greater celandine; and they arched up and over, and twined their blooms amidst the sweeping branches of the weeping willow.

The weather was gloriously sunny and hot, and I lay on a blanket under the willow tree every day, and read Geoffrey Trease and Jennings and William Mayne and Hans Brinker, and 'Where Matthew Lives', and other childhood classics, whilst the bees hummed busily around me, and the cuckoo sat at the top of a nearby sweet chestnut tree and 'cu-ckooed' with all his might. It was a good holiday!

A bunch of Queen Elizabeth roses

At the end of the fortnight we had a leisurely drive up through Normandy, took the ferry over from Caen, and arrived back very late on the Saturday of the jubilee weekend. It poured with rain all the way home from Portsmouth. Oh to be in England...

But before we left France, our Queen Elizabeth rose had come into full bloom; and so we felt that whatever the next few days might hold, our jubilee celebrations had at least got off to a good start.

Time to stand and stare

These weeks of rain, followed by a weekend of warmth and sunshine, have done their work. Over night it seems, our garden has changed. It is no longer bare and brown with just a few smudges of spring colour here and there; now the spidery branches are once more thickly covered with leaves, the creeping clematis is beginning to poke shyly through the hedge, and the lawn is dappled with fallen apple blossom.

In the mornings I make buckwheat porridge for breakfast, and now and then I will pause in the midst of my culinary hustle and bustle to look out of the window over the garden. Most days it is just being its ordinary self, but sometimes I see something special - maybe the greater spotted woodpecker tapping away at the peanut feeder; or a thrush standing quite still in the middle of the lawn; or a sparrow hawk resting on the hedge. And then I take a moment to stop, and stare...

"What is this life if full of care,
   We have no time to stand and stare?
 No time to stand beneath the boughs
   And stare as long as sheep, or cows.
 No time to see, when woods we pass,
   Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
 No time to see, in broad daylight,
   Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
 No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
   And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
   Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this, if full of care,
  We have no time to stand and stare."
                                   - William Henry Davies

Rotten trees and wild posies

Where the tree was...

Even before I look out of my window in the morning, the difference in the quality of light tells me that the tree isn't there.

Rotten on the inside.

I feel a little as though I have suddenly lost a close friend in a car crash. Every morning when I wake, the tree isn't there; and in the evening when I go to bed, the tree is not there. When I walk out of the front door I see in the empty expanse of sky that she is missing; and when I come home, she is still not there.
But she was a sick tree; and though it's possible that she might have lasted many years yet, it is also possible that the next storm would have brought her crashing down, and if that happened it would have been a miracle if no one (or no house) was harmed...

But life goes on, as my mother tells me. And though my tall, graceful sycamore has gone (and the red kites keep swooping over, with nowhere to land), the wild flowers are beginning to bloom in the hedgerows and verges. I went out yesterday and picked myself a posy, and tied it with a piece of grass.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower..."

  - William Blake