Three Beautiful Things - Names

Keywording photographs from the garden is a chore, but sometimes it turns up tiny linguistic patterns not unlike those of the insects I've been photographing all summer.

1. The Dutch name for the Southern Hawker dragonlfly is the Blue Glassmaker
2. The Spanish name for Dandelion is Diente de león, which means Lion's teeth
3. The latin name for the Small Skipper's means Little Dancer of the Woods

Great Responsibility

We split our new bee colony to stop it swarming in May. The poor summer made that, in hindsight, a bad idea and neither colony prospered through the damp summer. One lost its queen and we imposed a new head of state with a varroa sensitive queen from Northumberland Bees. The other lagged and, eventually, we decided to join the two colonies back together. Feed feed feed said everyone, so we gave the ladies two litres of sugar syrup which is a kilo of sugar. It was gone in a day. Our efforts to make sure that the bees didn't drown in their feeder turned out to be overkill. Now they shove their heads into the liquid as we pour it into the hive, drinking from the stream like children in a fountain on a hot summer day. We'll have no honey this year, but the ladies are heading into winter with a full hive and full bellies.

Naughty Girls

This strange spring was perhaps not the best time to start beekeeping, but the Night Planted Orchard is now home to two colonies of honeybees. We bought a thriving hive from a local beekeeper who is winding down. They were so vigorous that we had to split them straight away. Then the spring refused to start and in the cold and the rain, the new colony didn't seem to get going. After two weeks, we inspected them fully expecting to find a hive of dead bees in one and a queenless, angry mass in the other. Instead we found two fine colonies and in the old one, a mass of wild comb pushed between the frames.

Naughty girls.

So we cut out the wild comb and drained two teaspoons of honey from it which drew from Lady Snoutingdingle the most radiant smile I've seen in many a year. For that, I forgive them the sting they gave me right on the end of my nose.

Spring, you're needed.

I heard an interview with Richard Dawkins on his 80th birthday. To paraphrase he said that the way that he thought about death and ageing was driven by the understanding that being alive was an enormous privilege and that the vast majority of potential humans are never born. For me, nothing drives home that sense of privilege more than the spring.

My day job is essentially about safety and my lockdown has been punctuated by days away. In the late summer I travelled to Salisbury a couple of times to work with soldiers. That was echoed by an early spring trip to Northumberland as part of the same project. On the way up, the weather was glorious. Having watched the heart of England fall asleep in September, I was treated to the chance to watch it wake up all along the Great North Road as though I was taking a core sample of spring in England. I find that there is a progression between the early blossom of sloes and mirabelles on bare branches and the flush of new leaves. One has a spectacular contrast in the sun, the other is a gentle rush, as though the trees are wiping the sleep from their eyes. That filled me with joy. I watch the trees coming awake in the Night Planted Orchard with unusual impatience.

Come on spring, we need you now more than we ever have.

Songs are like tattoos

Who said that? Joni Mitchell I think. Some people write in a way which gets under your skin. Cormac Mcarthy is another. That kind of writing can be deceptively simple.

I always wonder if these links help, hinder or appropriate their owners' works. In the sincere hope that it's the first of those. Chris Wood is a master of the art who can write a song about an old sofa which will leave you needing a moment. Here is a set of his which also chimes with the Night Planted Orchard. Enjoy.

Chris Wood's Lockdown Set.