The Nature Table: July

This month’s nature table smells divine.

For weeks now, I’ve walked up the lane to the house in a cloud of honeysuckle and mock orange perfume.  Sublime.  The moors have been softly scented by clover blossoms which carpet the ground where the buttercups dance.

All this scent goes a little way towards making up for the lack of berries.  July should be bilberry month.  My fingers are usually stained purple around now; and the moor edges populated by small groups of people bent double over plastic tubs….painstakingly picking the tiny fruits one by one.  But not this year.  Must be down to the long dry spring we had (there’s a downside to everything).

Instead, the apple harvest has come several weeks early.  The trees in the neighbouring field are laden with ripe fruit.  I heard on the radio it’s the earliest season on record.  Must be down to the long dry spring we had (there’s an upside to everything).

The grasses have caught my attention as much as the flowers this month….waving with the breeze and catching the light.  They reach to my waist; the thistles are even higher.  And now the tall purple foxgloves have given way to the tall purple rosebay willowherb.

There’s a satisfied kind of ampleness to July.  Even without the bilberries.

Light Hunting

All through July, I’ve been Light Hunting with my pal, Vivienne McMaster.

Viv and I roomed together at Squam a couple of years back.  She’s a lovely spirit and extremely talented.  One of my absolute favourite photographers. 

Light Hunters is her latest e-course….an easy, gentle affair ideally suited to the lazy days of summer.  Each day, a missive from Viv has popped into my inbox, inviting me to explore a new aspect of light.  Daily snippets of wisdom and playfulness.  Typically Viv.

It so happens that it’s Miss Vivienne’s birthday today.  So I’m….

‘Wishing you a wonderful day and an extraordinary, light-filled year, Lovely!’

Images of Summer (4)

You’ll have noticed that so far I’ve failed spectacularly to take the promised break from this blog. 

Just can’t keep away!

The Crab-Apple Tree

Drove to the East Riding today and stopped for five minutes en route so Joss could stretch his legs.  And there, in the hedgerow, was a crab-apple tree, laden with ripening fruit.  Such a lovely surprise.

Arriving home several hours later, I found a book I’d ordered a while ago had finally turned up: A Tree In Your Pocket by Jacqueline Memory Paterson.  I pulled it from its packet and it fell open at The Apple Tree.  Don’t you just love ‘coincidences’ like that?!

There followed several pages of delightful facts about the wild crab-apple.  Among other things I learned that felling an apple tree once carried the death penalty.  And that you can cure warts by rubbing them with two halves of an apple then burying the fruit in the ground.  As the apple decays, the warts disappear.

So now you know!

Images of Summer (3)

Silaging and hay making were in full swing last week.  But then the rain came….