The IsamBards at the 2019 Bee and Pollination Festival

Following our poetry walks at the Bristol Botanic Garden back in May, the IsamBards were invited to lead some more during the Bee Festival last weekend. 

Hastily we dug out our poems that mentioned bees and other pollinators, and wrote a few more to supplement them. All set.

The heavens opened between the two walks on Saturday, resulting in fewer listeners for our second walk on Saturday afternoon, which also clashed with a guided tour of the garden.

In fact, there was only one. 

And yet, in a blatant contravention of all the known laws of poetry readings, we actually gathered more listeners as we proceeded around the garden. Much like a stone does moss. Or a tree trunk fungi.

One of the women we'd accumulated came up almost in tears at the end of the walk, and told us how terribly depressed she'd been feeling about the state of the country - nay, the world - but that listening to poetry had made her feel better. 

Even if some of the poems were about how much worse it will be without pollinators. 

Talking of which, after I'd shared my lunch with this robin and before the afternoon walk, I wandered  around the garden photographing them. 

Are ladybirds pollinators? Yes!

Note also photobombing shield bug.

And as is the way of things, along came a few other IsamBardian opportunities as we went on our merry way.

Look out for possible future encounters with the IsamBards in Bristol and Somerset in the run up to Christmas, and at Arnos Vale cemetery. 

(Ooh good, a use for all those poems about death.) 

And we were interviewed and photographed, jointly and severally, for a putative article in the Guardian, about the bee festival, or maybe bee-keeping in general, and of course that sort of happening usually has Disappointment written all over it, but no doubt we'll be scouring the papers for a month or so.

Postscript: Here is the article! 

Photo by Alex Turner for The Guardian