For me .

This post is for me and for any one else who is worried that the world has gone mad.

The lilies smell incredible and have withstood lashing rain and hail.

The view is dawn this morning.

Flaming June

This month has roared by. The start was so beautiful it took my breath away .

Not my garden!

Peonies and sweet peas, rose gardens laden with perfume and delphiniums the colours of Greek seas.

Mornings absolutely crammed with astounding moths and then such heat that we had to close the shutters and imagine there was no outside and read scratchy novels inside.

Then the storms cleared the polluted air and we cracked open the windows again. Suddenly the lawn was fissured and brown, the peonies were long gone and the roses were fried, but the everlasting Sweetpea explosively scrambling over everything. The red currants and gooseberries were ripe to falling and the little fig tree, I was sure had died, put out green leaves.

The month isn’t over . The rain has revived so much, and June flames on !

Story of the night

One of the reasons I like moths are their names. The names are redolent of Victorian parsonages , where I imagine bewhiskered vicars pouring over newly caught specimens and allowing themselves a rare flight of fancy, as they coin a name for their new find.

The practice still continues. A recently named moth is a type of rustic moth is called Clancy’s Rustic after Mr Clancy, who first identified it in Britain . I caught this moth in my light trap in France last year and was impressed by the gold outline of the diagnostic kidney mark on its wing.

Other moths also have wonderfully distinctive names. My current favourites are the Uncertain and the Red- necked footman. The pinky freckled moth is rather romantically called the Maiden’s Blush and the flashy spotted moth is a Scarlet Tiger. There is a dark Grey Dagger, an Old Lady , a Gypsy Moth, an Elephant Hawk moth and a Silver Cloud, to name but a few.

It is too hot to go out today so I think I will concoct a story involving an old lady with a grey dagger who fools the red necked footman into allowing the uncertain, blushing maiden to meet the scarlet tiger, before disappearing on a silver cloud pursued by a random elephant riding a huge hawk.

I think that I might have been out in the sun too much – roll on the night!

What is it?

What do you see? What is it?

Ideas in the comments section please!

No Mow May – retrospective.

I stopped mowing my lawn as soon as I had one.

We once rented part of a very old bake house that belonged to Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. We were responsible for a dank patch of grass next to the village pond. In the first no mow spring, early purple orchids came up.

We moved to Wales and eventually put down a deposit on a bungalow on the edge of a venerable town. Masses of ox- eye daisies came up along with red campion and dandelions . We were not yet brave enough to let them all grow, but soon learnt that you could mow paths through your “meadow” and this semblance of order kept the neighbours happy.

In the tropical countries in which we subsequently lived, lawns were rare and generally composed of tough mat grasses that had never been meadowlands, but not cutting the grass still allowed bigger ant hills to flourish and ant loving birds to feed.

In France we bought a flat slab of lawn surrounded by low maintenance evergreens and chicken wire. Our cat was deeply unimpressed, as there was no where to hide and absolutely no life to hunt. We agreed with him and took to diligent neglect or re-wilding, as it is more fashionably called.

Birch trees, ash, dogwood, spindle and wild privet self seeded and in a corner we let them all grow. In the grass; hawks bit, eye bright, ladies smock, bugle, daisies and dandelions, sedges and plantains, fox and cubs, primroses and cowslips, teasels, evening primroses and mulleins appeared in their seasons. We collected local wild seeds and threw them in for good measure. The ox eye daisies and the hay rattle never took, like wise the foxgloves, but then it all depends of what type of soil you have and when you eventually do cut the grass.

If you never cut the grass, then bushes and finally trees will take over. We allowed this happen in a part of the garden and now that part is full of nesting birds and mice and hedgehogs. The cats now have so many places to hunt, sun and to hide that they are happy to stay safe in our garden away from the traffic and the thundering computer driven tractors.

There is no down side to not mowing your lawn. You have more time to enjoy your garden, the garden is infinitely quieter and the difference to the amount of life that will live with you in your garden, is absolutely staggering .

No Mow May, No Mow June and a bit of mowing if you don’t want a forest glade. What could be easier!???

Hart’s Tongue

These beautiful ferns stay green all through the darkest months of winter and when they make new leaves in the spring, the slowly uncurling fronds look like the soft tongue of a female deer – a hart.

I decided that the world had gone to hell in a hand basket when I saw a venerable old pub in the Cotswolds had changed its sign from that of a deer, to that of a cheesy looking gold heart and of course the spelling of the name was changed from the Golden Hart to the Golden Heart.

I have since realised that there are other things more worthy of getting angry about in the world and so I enjoy watching the ferns unfurl in the late spring and imagining that a real deer might even lick the rain from their glossy surface.