Category: summer stories
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A good year for Holly Blues
The other day I counted four Holly Blue butterflies around the park. It doesn’t sound many. But it is. Most summers I am pleased to see one or two. This year they seem to be everywhere. A flash of blue rises from the brambles, another circles the holly before disappearing into the canopy, while a…
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The Queen of May
May Day is gathered together in Nowhere Wood. The guests are all assembled, having arrived in timely order, ready for the magical day. First to arrive was the wild garlic, clean and green with the freshness of a memory of good times around the family table. Then the first bluebell opened up to the sky,…
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The end of the summer
Nowhere Wood has a weary silence, as the heat stifles its life. It is ready with its autumn plans, which cannot start until it rains. Rain, the life-giver. Yet in flood, rain is the also the destroyer. It is a question of balance. Is the balance changing in the wood? Is the balance changing in…
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The fairy ring
Just outside of Nowhere Wood, next to the school playing fields, you can, on a summer evening, sometimes see a fairy ring. The photograph shows parts of this fairy ring: sometimes you can find rings that form a perfect circle. How many fungi can you see here? There are about 15 mushrooms – the…
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Days of gentle ripening
It is mid-July and it has rained for the first time in several weeks. Gentle warm rain, interspersed with strong sunshine. These are the days of gentle ripening, to complete the work that started in in the blossom season of the early spring. The orchard in Trendlewood Park has a collection of ripening fruit trees…
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I bear their homes, too
For Jules Acton, author of Oaklore. The old oak tree said to the traveller passing by: “You know me, you see me everyday. I am that oak tree that has stood here longer than any of can you remember.” “I am on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map and I was a sturdy tree, even back…
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A home for the summer
By the high summer of July, the new fresh leaves of the horse chestnut are losing their lustre. The proud spread of leaves are now crumpled and marked—creased with dry, papery wounds edged in rust. At first glance, it looks like disease or drought. But the truth is stranger, and smaller. These are the workings…
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It’s Flying Ant Day!
Today is Flying Ant Day: the day that ants take to the air and fly at the same time. The ants are from different colonies that can be several hundred metres apart. Let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day! To some, it’s a minor nuisance. They land in your lemonade, tangle in your hair, and make picnics…
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Echoes from Nowhere
It is twilight on the first warm evening after midsummer: a black shape flickers like a dream above our heads. The bat moves quickly, all in a blur, and it is hard to make out its form. We can see the zig-zag patterns it makes in the air. Behind her, in the rafters of an…
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The Lords and Ladies of Nowhere Wood
Nowhere Wood in late winter is a place of bare branches, weak shadowy light and unspoken secrets, waiting for new leaves start to emerge. On the woodland floor, hidden beneath the shade of hazel and hawthorn, something strange is happening. By April, it is fully revealed. It’s not flashy, no pretty flower show. Just a…
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A tale of two butterflies
It is a sunny afternoon in May and two butterflies are flying round each other in a shaft of sunlight. The smaller one chases the larger one away. I first thought they were a courting pair, but then realised they are different types. Where do they come from and what are they doing in the…
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The story of bluebells
If primroses and cowslips are our favourite flowers of early Spring, then it is the bluebells that steal our hearts in early Summer. On a sunny day, they dust the floor of the wood in a blue mist. Many poets have written in wonder of them. Alfred, Lord Tennyson may have walked the bluebell woods…