It has been a funny old year weatherwise: a wet spring followed by a wet July and an even wetter early August, after a dry interlude in June. But while it may not have been a great summer for us, and even less for the poor farmers trying to harvest between showers, it has been a wonderful year for wildflowers. Late-summer flowers like lady’s bedstraw, marjoram, knapweed and agrimony produced spectacular carpets of colour, matching those of cowslips in the spring. Cycling round the outer parts of the parish I have seen some equally beautiful field margins sown with colourful flowers that have largely vanished from the countryside, including corncockle, cornflower, and corn marigold: pink, blue and yellow amongst a froth of white mayweed studded with scarlet poppies. A better-than-average crop of acorns, hazelnuts, haws and blackberries is on the way, and by early August, fungi were appearing in the fields and woods, including mushrooms. In one place I was shown giant puffballs, like great white footballs, although a tractor unfortunately flattened them.
Many will have noticed the exceptional numbers of red admiral butterflies, probably the result of a migration from the Mediterranean rather than home-grown. There were also numbers of large whites, perhaps distracted from our garden and allotment cabbages by the strips of yellow-flowering brassicas planted in many fields as (presumably) a cover crop. More worrying is the lack of small tortoiseshell butterflies this summer. They are known to be vulnerable to the predations of a parasitic fly, and, if so, should bounce back. In the garden we spotted two musk beetles, big green beetles with long ‘horns’ (antennae) probably breeding in an old oak stump, and two kinds of bush-crickets, the dark and Rousels’ bush-crickets, with their long, spidery back legs. The latter has a chirp that sounds like crackling electricity, but unfortunately my aging ears can no longer hear it.
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