Still the subject of weather dominates our thoughts and concerns. The temperature moved slowly towards a warmer note, but we had some very cold days for this time of year. The thunderstorms and heavy rain made their presence felt; the phone went dead for days on end and the leaking roof in my workshop was a glorious display of the damage that can be wreaked from such weather. Occasionally the sun would shine through the cloud and show us how hot it was, but it never stayed for long. The open fire often beckoned in the long evenings. The summer solstice and the midsummer eve both passed in a warm haze of clouds.
These are the days when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky and gives us the shortest nights of the year. On midsummer day, we had 16 hours and 51 minutes of daylight this year. Such moments are celebrated in different ways around the globe. Here, in Britain, Stonehenge is our best known venue for all sorts of solar celebrations with pagans, druids, revellers and many more witnessing the sunrise and sunset. In Greece they celebrate with a hike to the peak of Mount Olympus, about 9,573 feet. Just a gentle stroll then. Traditionally in Cornwall beacons were lit all around the coast. An editorial from the Cornishman on 17th June 1880 gives a sense of the communal aspect of these events far outside our national borders, ‘when our Penzance lads are lighting their fires or waving the torches around their heads it is a strange thought that far to the North, amidst the fjords of Norway, on the crags of Scotland; to the South amidst the Menherion of Brittany; to the East, in the forests of Russia, or on the Carpathian peaks, fires will be burning on the same evening in honour of Midsummer-tide. Penzance and Krakow are at one on this point’. It lost its charm due to an over -zealous use of gunpowder in the celebrations with disastrous results but it has re-emerged in recent years, (without the gunpowder), as part of The Golowan Festival. The Cornish word ‘goluan’ means light and rejoicing and ‘gool’ is the word for feast, fair or festival. (www.golowanfestival.org).
Essentially these festivals were concerned with the fertility of the land and ways to honour the sun for bringing good harvests. To play my part I’ve been checking out all the food available in the field for foraging and from all that I read this is a plentiful time - if only I could identify the harvest on offer. And so I went, armed with books about free food and found the field awash with edible plants. This year the land appears to be more abundant in wildflowers but this could be due to me actively seeking out residents in the field. Blankets of blues, pinks and yellows intermingle with the grasses. There are more flying insects and butterflies especially in the lower and more sheltered part of the field. As I walk through swathes of creeping thistles and mixed grasses, my path becomes alive with clouds of buzzing and flying insects. All the usual suspects; Red Admiral, Small Tortoiseshell, Hedge Brown, Meadow Brown, others that I don’t know plus that controversial beast the Large White. I have a love/hate relationship with the White – it can happily annihilate any brassica crop in the vegetable plot and put an end to the nasturtiums but still I try to welcome it with the hope that it is also doing some good, somewhere.
The tufted vetch is top wildflower this month, prolific and hardy it tumbles over the hedges and provides a rich source of food for the bees, who visit in great numbers. However, ‘there is one enemy that the vetch flower cannot guard against, and that is the burglar bee’. (Nuttal circa 1912). Apparently these burglar bees do not drink of the honey in, ‘the legitimate way’, instead they, ‘settle on the stalk and bore a hole through the base of the flower’ and here they suck out the honey without sharing any of the pollen they collect. It seems scandalous. Nuttal can find no explanation for such criminal behaviour, and he is left wondering ‘what first leads a bee into these evil ways, unless, indeed, a taint of vice exists even among such humble members of the animal world’. Evil, burglar bees – who knew? (Clearly Nuttal), but now I am left wondering what other criminals exist out there and what crimes are being committed without my knowledge? So much more for me to learn.
Коментари