"At Christmas, I no more desire
a rose, than wish a snow in May's new fangled birth; But like of each thing
that in season grows." William Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost.
July
already. Half-way point of the year. How are your gardens coming along? It
won’t get much better than this so enjoy the colours. Summer, seems to have
finally arrived. Pleasantly warm, blue skies, light winds. After the coldest
and wettest June that I can remember in all my time in London, things have
calmed down. And following the incongruity of last weekend’s brief
Mediterranean heat, the ‘Spanish Plume’, plume not plum, as they call it -
essentially hot air travelling up from Africa across the Iberian Peninsula
towards us - things have developed into a classic English summer. That intense
level of heat of last Saturday just feels odd. You should be in a place with
palm trees and ice cold cerveza and
calamari when it’s thirty-three degrees. Now it’s looking good for quite a
while AND it’s the first week of Wimbledon too. Lovely weather and Wimbledon
without rain. England at its best. Don’t read the newspapers or watch the
politicians. That’s England at its worst. Watch tennis. And good news, it’s not
been snatched by Sky Sports yet either.
Is
Wimbledon the greatest tournament of all? I’d say so, but I loathe comparison
and everything or almost everything in life is subjective. Is it just jingoism?
Nostalgia? Perhaps, but not quite. There is something about the grass, the
gentility, the history, the atmosphere, the uniqueness. A cushion to protect
those of us lucky enough to love the game from the harsher realities of the
world. Or at least forget them temporarily. But tennis is more than that. We
can learn from it. Wimbledon is a place where beauty, dignity and respect
thrive, one or two Australian louts aside. Neither beauty nor dignity nor
respect are priorities of politicians or the capitalist machine. Now the French open, also a great tournament,
is played on clay. Clay will never have the romance of grass. That’s just
aesthetics, it’s a natural reaction of the senses. If you go to Paris and go to
one of the beautiful parks, on closer inspection, the white gravel leaves you a
bit cold. And they don’t let you sit on the grass. A double whammy. The French
are better than us at many things, including tennis – Andy Murray aside - but
regarding public parks, perhaps they can cede defeat. Regents Park, Hampstead
Heath, Richmond Park and all the other beautiful parks up and down the country
are testimony to that. And an English garden does, after all, have a certain renown
and reputation.
So back to the garden. The French
lavender, after a strong April and May is suffering, losing most of its colour
and the bees with it. Perhaps the cold and wet of June did for it. And I have
noticed waking around the neighbourhood that English lavender is currently
thriving. A beautiful purple/blue colour with intense perfume. Perhaps that’s
my comeuppance for being too pro-European. An interesting development has been
the white lavender. This is the wonder of a garden. It was planted last year
but I don’t remember it being white before. In retrospect, I think it didn’t
flower. The scabious is thriving, loved by bees as is the buddleia, a late
bloomer and always welcome. On the lawn, some buttercups have sprung up. What a
thrill to see those yellow flowers. The simple act of visual recognition does
something to the brain and takes you back through time to childhood innocence
and enthusiasm. Well, I was mostly innocent. The other marvel is the thyme pot.
A pot belonging to my absent friend Daniel Kirkpatrick who cooked with it when
he was still with us. The mass of colours would have pleased him. And the roses
are currently budding again after their first flowering. There is literally one
rose flower in bloom today (from three plants). A single solitary and most
beautiful English Miss, yes that’s the name; English Miss. Delightful name,
delightful colour and perfume. And perhaps just one is apt. Two English Misses
could be considered indecent.
Birdlife is relatively quiet. Swifts
screeching across the sky, like something from Star Wars, herald summer at its
peak. Still city birds, unlike swallows for example, they nest in holes they
find in these old Victorian houses. The odd blackcap, a summer visitor, the odd
wren, so tiny. Blue and great tits. Goldfinches, so gregarious and beautiful. A
dunnock, the bird which proves that still waters run deep. Drab and brown they
hop about looking for seeds. But they enjoy rather exciting love lives.
Polygamous, essentially the swingers of the bird world. The ubiquitous robin
and blackbird. Blackbirds are rather taken for a granted, I think. Their
melodious song is one of the symbols of spring and summer and the male is
really rather beautiful. Jet black plumage contrasting with orange eyes and
beak. Sadly, no summer visitors such as warblers yet, but there is time for
that. Plenty of unidentifiable insects flying about. A large green cricket on
the wall. Little centipedes fleeing the light when uncovered by moving plant
pots. An unusual wasp with long antennae. A harvestman which I don't think I've
seen since I was a kid. No it's not a cheap pub chain. It's related to spiders.
A round body and giant long legs. The odd mammoth bumble bee and some solitary
wasps and bees. Small. Tiny in fact and colourful. They’re useful pollinators
and unlike social wasps and bees, the fear of a sting, which we seem to have
ingrained in us, is an irrelevance. Hoverflies too, using wasp mimickery to
trick potential predators - are again harmless and identifiable, by their hovering,
naturally enough. All these insects are what you want you to see in your
garden. One other more unusual sight last Saturday evening was a hummingbird
hawkmoth. Very striking, it is basically, a large striped moth that feeds like
a hummingbird i.e. hovering in front of plants to suck their nectar with a long
proboscis. And it is predominantly Mediterranean. We saw one whilst walking
past a garden. Almost certainly it hitched a ride on the Spanish plume across
the English Channel, ended up in North London and presumably returned again as
the weather cooled. They surely couldn’t survive a normal summer here. An
astonishing thing is nature. Now back to the tennis.
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