Deborah Harvey : The Red Dress of Poetry ...: April Elsewhere

Monday 1 May 2023

April Elsewhere

As I write, it's the first of May and there is no may to be seen up the field, or out over the farmland. The wet cold weather this spring means the whitethorns are several weeks late blossoming. And when I say wet, it has been wet.

Never mind, all the heady exhilaration of hawthorn is still to come, and if the display is anything like the (also late) blackthorn we've had this last month, it will have been worth waiting for.

It's been like watching colossal, slow-moving waves of white blossom roll their way around the field edges, from the sunnier hedgerows to the more northerly ones.

Flowers are starting to pop their heads up above the parapet now too. The white violets in the Small Dark Wood of the Mind and the purple ones I spotted in the middle of the Field of the Hollowing Oak for the first time were past their best before April had much advanced, but the celandines and ground ivy are still going strong, and have been joined by silverweed, buttercups, herb Robert, cowslips, bugle, forget-me-nots, and the most spectacular display of dandelions. Grasses are starting to flower now too, and some of the anthills in the field have covered themselves in speedwell and bittercress.

A fragile pleated inkcap appeared briefly in the field ...

... and some insects have stayed still long enough for me to photograph them too.

a Common Carder bumble bee, a green dock beetle, first ladybird of the year and something that looks superficially like a ladybird but isn't and I don't know what it is

Meanwhile, the rookery is full of Sturm und Drang. There have been ravens and buzzards, but none of them have stayed around to be photographed. I did find this beautiful starling feather in the field, which is a bit strange as I don't think I've ever seen starlings up there. Maybe it was flying over.

Most exciting of all, the roe deer are back - I've seen hoofprints out on the farmland and in the field, though no sighting of them in person just yet.

And all the time, the hollowing oak has been getting on with the process of leafing, and for the first time in three years, it's also covered in blossom. Expect an excellent mast year.

1st April

6th April

7th April

19th April

20th April

26th April

29th April

There was despair early in the month when the footpath along the embankment was closed and a digger turned up in the skylarks' field, solidifying our vague feeling of dread into resignation that the building of the access road had finally started.

Then a sign was attached to the fencing explaining that the digging constituted temporary archaeological works. I was a bit sceptical about the instruments these archaeologists were using, till the Northerner reminded me that there's a digger on site in Detectorists, when they're excavating the crashed WWII bomber (series 2).

And then they'd gone and taken their digger with them. Presumably they found no long lost Roman city or plaguey burial pit. There will be no scraping of trowel on mosaic to hold off the building of houses here, but with luck, we might get another summer walking the footpath.

The other progress has been of the sun along the line of hills to the west, on evenings when the cloud hasn't been too thick to see it.