Month: July 2023

Japanese Calendar

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I read about Japanese seasonal calendars made up of micro seasons and was intrigued.

I decided last year to try to compile my own .

It has taken me a year of just noting the most significant seasonal mile stones and ignoring the urge to encompass everything.

This is the result.

Why not try it for your own patch of the world?

Resist the urge to fill in months from memory and only write a few lines when the month is over and then you will have an intensely personal poem for your world.

January

Walnut trees are smooth barked

Wet soil creeps over the path

February

Ice on fallen leaves

Logs are sawn

March

Seeds are sown on crowded waiting, window sills.

April

Cuckoo flowers in the grass

Cherry trees blossom between the wind.

May

Buttercups flower

Frogs croak

Potato plants are up

sun flower seeds have four leaves

Roses bud

June

Love in a mist is in flower

Red gooseberries sweeten

Glossy cherries shine in paper punnets

July

Phylox blooms

The water butts run dry

Butterflies are everywhere

August

Grass browns

Spindle berries turn pink

Ravens call again

Nights cool

September

Dew on spider’s webs

Lingering heat

Dahlias

October

Leaves mottled with age

The sounds change

November

Before first frost a few flowers struggle on

The willow leaves fall over night

December

Deer bark in the darkness

The bird bath is solid ice.

Sorry for the adverts!

Pink bottom.

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After a very slow start to the mothing season, things are finally heating up again in the moth trap.

Last night I got two elephant hawk moths, but they are not the same species.

The first, pink and orange beauty is the small elephant hawk moth – Deilephila porcellus For identification purposes it has wavey lines of colour on the wings.

The second is the elephant hawk Deilephila elpenor with straight demarcations of colour on the wings. It is larger than the first and has the most gloriously exuberant, lipstick pink bum!

It was unusual to see them both on the same day, so I thought I would share them with you, in case you ever want to tell them apart. The name comes from the caterpillar that looks like an elephant’s trunk.

The caterpillars feed mainly on rosebay willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium), but also other plants as well, including bedstraw (Galium)

In French they are petit and grande sphinx de la vigne – sphinx of the vineyard, which is an evocative image improbable image!

We have a few vines in the garden but luckily we are not hot or dry enough to possibly call the garden a vineyard.

Luckily no one has told the moths!

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”

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The perfume of a flower is as essential to it’s appeal, as is the beauty of its colour and shape; but a great deal harder to share in a blog! Any way I will try to evoke just a few of the perfumes of my garden in July.

Petunias are irresistible summer stalwarts, but too often they are utterly with out scent. It seems only purple petunias are perfumed (try saying that fast!) . I have some grown from seed this year that promised perfume and they have not disappointed, being at their strongest in the evening and the deep colour is luminous in the dusk.

Meadow sweet takes its name from its delicious almond perfume. This frothy exuberant wild flower loves a sunny day to pour out its perfume. I have a big clump that flowers at the start of the school holidays and it always smells of intoxicating freedom to me!

Evening primrose, flowers not surprisingly, in the evening and all night long. It has a delicate spicy perfume and is attractive to moths as well as humans. By midday the flowers are shrivelled, but the next evening you can watch a new flower unfurl in front of your eyes.

Mignonette has small sweet scented flowers which soon turn to seeds that will catch on anything passing.

The most powerfully perfumed flowers in the garden today are the Madonna lilies . They produce such a cascade of rich of scent that they stop you in your tracks. You have to stop and inhale the heady wave of gorgeousness . A rose chafer beetle appears to have swooned and is motionless in cocoon of petals.

I have to end with a rose. The unlovely named cabbage roses have the best perfume and there is absolutely nothing to compare with the silky complexity of the scent of a rose . To bury your nose in the Turkish delight of a scented pink rose is luxury indeed!


“… would smell as sweet…”
Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare

The Future: AI.

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I was just looking at the WordPress site of someone who was kind enough to follow my blog and l saw this advert , which I thought I would share with you.

Advert on WordPress

AICHATBOT – EXPLODE YOUR BLOGS ENGAGEMENT

Highly Intelligent AI Generated Articles For Your WordPress Blog.

End of Advert

AI is going to be a feature of our future and it seems even innocent blogs are not immune.

The question of why any one would want to read an AI generated blog , is obviously uppermost; but the much bigger question is why would anyone/anything want to generate one?

The only answer I can see, is to influence the reader without them realising that they are being manipulated. Advertising has attempted to do this for ever and product placement is the staple of modern influencers – so why worry?

Well, the idea that absolutely nothing can be taken as “true” any more; from the voice of a politician to the content of an innocuous blog is profoundly disturbing.

I have no intention of using robots to write this little blog, but it does make me increasingly wary of what I read on WordPress and on other social media sites.

Advertising funds WordPress. I don’t like some adverts that I see when reading blogs, but I can generally ignore them because I am sufficiently interested to see what the writer of the blog has to say.

How long will that last if you don’t know if the writer was even human?!