Over the years, I’ve often made reference to mean reversion, at least as far as the weather is concerned, so it’s no surprise for me to report that after the exceptional “Lotus Land” experience of unbroken dry weather recorded in my last post, the weather throughout July has been more normal for West Wales in the summer – cool, often very breezy, with winds from the North, and frequent rain.

At this rate, July 2023 will join March 2023 as the gloomiest of the series of named months we’ve experienced here since I recorded such things, using our PV inverter data. And possibly gloomier even than April 2023. Not the gracefully curving bell curve peak of high summer, one might expect.

We haven’t had more than 2 days without some rain since June 11th, and there’s no prospect of haymaking weather looking ahead right to the end of August, at present. Despite some fleetingly glorious scenes.

Frankly, though, we’d rather have this, thanks to the wandering Jetstream, than suffer the extreme temperatures and fires that several of the Greek islands and Southern Europe have experienced this summer.

I’ve not been making hay, but more on this at the very end of this post, and this means the bulk of the upper meadow is still uncut and a gorgeously fading vista of taupes and pale golds with dabs of bright yellow, blue, orange and purple.

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I thought I should write a small piece about collecting and trying to germinate Daphne bholua seed since this is widely rated as one of the best shrubs for scent in a garden. At any time of the year, but doubly valuable flowering for such a long season from mid-December in a good year, through to April, as it did in 2023. It’s also one that we’re fortunate to be able to grow quite easily into spreading, tall thickets in several parts of the garden. Any garden visitors from December through into late March are invariably wowed by its scent which can be picked up from many yards away. And often ask if we have any plants for sale – and usually, the answer is very few since it’s a fussy and slow thing to propagate vegetatively. Our honey bees also love it for its off-season pollen and nectar – always available from flowers which don’t close in inclement weather.

The shrub is native to the high Himalayas from Nepal, Tibet and through Myanmar, Vietnam and Sichuan and Yunnan in China, where its bark is used for traditional paper making.

I’ve always struggled to find any fruit on it, despite the profusion of flowers produced over a season. Last year I found several small green berries and tried covering them with paper seed collecting bags, but to no avail – the fruit just seemed to fail to develop within these bags. This year, with more honey bee colonies active in the garden, a very dry and sunny February, and two of the three seedling Daphne bholua we’d acquired 5 years ago all flowering quite well, I reckoned I stood a better chance of collecting some viable seed. Perhaps this might eventually yield some interesting bholua variants, like the most special flowering seedling, below.

Once I began to spot a few small green fruit developing amongst the leaves towards the beginning of May, I did some research as to what to do with them. There seems to be very little good information online, but the consensus was that the fruit should be collected once it turns black, and the seed sown promptly, since as with oaks, it loses viability unless sown fresh.

So began a few weeks around the end of May, when I’d trawl around all the bushes every couple of days and slowly scan from multiple angles, looking for any berries that were turning black. Very similar to picking raspberries in that the fruit crop ripens sequentially over a long period. However, unlike raspberries, a 45-minute session didn’t yield a punnet full. More like 20 to 30 fruit on a good day, peak season!

I realised as the season went on, that nearly all the fruit were located on the eastern side of the shrub thickets, and at variable heights from the lowest branches upwards, though relatively few were found very high up. Once you get your eye in, it wasn’t difficult to spot them, but they did need removing with care, since once black they’re very lightly attached, and once they’ve dropped to the ground almost impossible to see. My guess is that this part of the shrub is most sheltered from our prevailing South Westerly winds, and hence it’s more likely that bees would visit these flowers in particular, or perhaps more often, and hence manage to achieve successful pollination. Given the tens of thousands of flowers the thickets produce each year, an eventual haul of just a few hundred fruit wasn’t phenomenal, but enough to merit some effort with germination. I’m indebted to Richard Bramley from Farmyard Nurseries (who incidentally also told me he’s never seen fruit on his Daphne bholua) who rang up a couple of experts in shrub propagation within the UK horticultural business for germination advice. The response was that they should germinate really easily! So fingers crossed.

After saving all the fruit over the collection period in our cool barn, the method used was to carefully squish off the pulpy black flesh from the single seeds in each fruit and then give them a quick rinse (wearing Marigold gloves since all parts of Daphne are toxic).

I then put them in a lidded plastic container mixed in with moist vermiculite, gravel and home-sourced rotted wood compost, and popped them in our fridge, on June 10th. I marked the diary for about 4 weeks to check them, but despite that, missed that date by a fortnight!

However, there was real excitement when I lifted the box out for the first time and could see many were obviously beginning to push out roots already in amongst the first signs of mould growing on the compost surface. Time for the next stage, I reckoned.

 

Working gently through the compost mix, I picked out any seeds with an obvious root, or where the dark seed capsule had already begun to split, revealing a now swollen, greenish endosperm. Half have been sown individually into my currently favoured deep root trainers and placed in a nearly full shade position and about half were sown directly into the soil in the shady South edge of a deep bed between the PV panels, which proved a successful location for growing on a few of the Daphne bholua suckers which I’d managed to sever a few years ago.

The rest of the compost in the container, probably still containing quite a few seeds, was returned to the fridge for a bit longer to see if any more seeds begin to sprout.

I await with great interest to see if any shoots emerge shortly, and have made sure to use a few ferric phosphate slug pellets around these locations since I’ve noticed slugs have damaged some of my young bholua plants in the past.

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After a spring in which few wasps seemed to be around, and indeed the first year ever when the Nectaroscordum flowers were largely visited by honey bees, and a few bumbles, yet no wasps, suddenly wasps have become more obvious. I’ve actually found 7 nests, all within 50 yards of the front door this year, though none actually inside the house as I managed to film last year. Two of these have been located beneath slates, four in the ground, and one above the entrance to the upper hay shed. Two of the ground-based nests in the upper hay meadow have been narrowly avoided by me when I was cutting hay with the Powerscythe, with me only spotting the nests weeks after the event. At the time of the cut, the nest was probably still being worked by just the queen. Now there’s such a steady stream of workers entering that getting a clear photo is tricky without standing directly in their flight path.

However, two in the garden nearly caused us problems. Fiona called me to look at a cloud of “bees” which were behaving in an odd way over one of our Rosa rugosa bushes. Might they be swarming, she wondered? A close look revealed that the group of noisy insects weren’t bees, but agitated wasps. As Fiona had got closer and closer to them, whilst working around the rose bushes doing a bit of gentle deadheading, they clearly began to become more defensive. Crouching down, I just managed to make out a grapefruit size nest suspended amongst the foliage of the rugosa bush.

My own escape was even more fortunate. I’d been working my way around the half a dozen blackcurrant bushes, trying to claim our fair share before the huge numbers of blackbirds in the garden this year snaffled them all. Treading on the cut tyre rims which encircle the currant’s woody stems, I suddenly became aware of a bit of noisy buzzing, so retreated and then realised there was a nest beneath ground, with an entrance between a couple of tyres, which I’d got to within about a foot of treading on.

Since wasps predate all manner of invertebrates as food for their larvae and also pollinate our autumn fruiting raspberries, along with smaller species of bumblebees, I suppose we should celebrate that the property supports such a vigorous community. However, it reinforces the point that it’s always worth scanning a shaded area of the garden for any obvious flight activity, before plunging in. At least from mid-June onwards. That and remembering to tuck socks into trouser bottoms. Sadly my days of gardening in shorts and T-shirts have long gone since I regularly suffer from small spider bites these days. These are distinctive 2 hole punctures which are never obvious at the time (unlike horseflies) but soon develop into intensely itchy and often spreading swollen, oedematous red zones which persist for several days, even when treated with the otherwise excellent Medihoney.

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As far as we can work out, we’ve only had one swallow chick hatch this year, and despite our best efforts at limiting the risk of feline, or avian predation, there’s been no second brood, and the swallows have largely left our landscape now, even before the end of July. Occasionally a single bird has been heard chattering above, or been seen clutching onto a telegraph wire. Yesterday, as I did a little hand weeding in the yard before heading off to The Royal Welsh Show, I jerked my head up to catch perhaps 20 cavorting merrily, but clearly en route, heading due South against the thick grey cloud. Perhaps we’re not alone and the swallows are giving up early on the Welsh summer of 2023?

However, every cloud, as they say, has a silver lining, or in this case, maybe a yellow one. I was excited to see what I was certain was a novel butterfly in our upper hay meadow this week, whilst mowing our path up to the shepherd’s hut.

It had an unfamiliar luminosity of yellow with a hint of almost fluorescent green and an obvious eye on the wing underside. Almost the size of a Meadow Brown, but wherever it paused to feed from the knapweed flowers, the neighbouring bumbles and butterflies seemed to sense that this was an alien, and quickly harried it into moving on. The only other yellow butterflies we’ve seen over the years have been a few Brimstones, and these were much earlier in the year. I dashed inside for the camera, and much to my surprise after scanning the meadow when I returned, spotted it flitting quickly above the grass stems a short distance from the mower, before landing on a patch of vibrant Bird’s-foot trefoil flowers.

It was almost a distillation, a dream capture of these colours, in motion. Then it was off again, pausing briefly on a distant betony, Stachys officinalis, flower. A quick zoom and a single distant blurry shot was all I managed before it was over the hills and far away. But a quick search confirmed what I thought – it was a Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus. The first time in my life that I’d ever seen one anywhere, and from scanning the records, it’s rarely been recorded in this part of the world before, being found more typically found around the coasts, as one might expect since it’s a migrant species which makes it to the UK from North Africa and Southern Europe each year. Usually in very small numbers, but occasionally in large clouds, remembered by those who witnessed them. Two such years were 1944 and 1947, recalled here by a young lad evacuated from London during the blitz, from this excellent short piece by Jesmond Harding in Butterfly Conservation Ireland:

One boy, Brian, returned to Surrey after two years in Cornwall and was astonished by the changes he saw:

“It was the summer (of 1944) of the great invasion; not by Rommell’s Panzers but by swarms of butterflies. In the park, where trenches had been dug across open fields to prevent German warplanes landing, thousands of tortoiseshells now sunned themselves on the tall thistles that had sprung unbidden from the disturbed clay.

As the summer advanced, clouds of migrant butterflies- peacocks, painted ladies, red admirals and clouded yellows poured across the channel on the bombsite buddleias, where they hung in clusters, drinking in the nectar with watch-spring tongues until they were too drunk to fly”.

However, this great Clouded Yellow migration from the continent caused great alarm among the Coast Watch personnel. They watched the clouds of yellow pouring over the sea in shock, believing that this was a poison gas attack. Happily, this turned out to be a great Clouded Yellow year. So was 1947, a year when post-war rationing was still very much in operation. At least nature was unrationed.

The excellent YouTube footage filmed in the UK by David Element, below, demonstrates how the butterfly always holds its wings closed at rest on a flower or leaf, but also how its colour changes depending on the angle of view and whether any sunlight passes through its wings, from buttery yellow to almost burned orange.

As well as this special sighting, the meadows and garden had already been alive with common meadow butterflies this year – Meadow Browns, Skippers and Ringlets, with a few Peacocks, Red Admirals and Small Tortoiseshells beginning to show up. Walk past the betony, knapweed and the special very early form of Devil’s-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis, that I’ve managed to propagate from a few seeds from a local meadow years ago, and clouds of often tatty butterflies take to the air. Perhaps there’s been less aerial predation with swallow numbers so low? Photographing them has certainly been a lot easier than normal, given their profusion along with the bumbles, and just today the first Hummingbird hawk-moth, Macroglossum stellatarum, for 2023. It appeared at coffee time on a muggy morning on a tough, hardy Salvia (possibly S. pratensis or S.p.Haematodes group), which came from another friend’s garden without a species name, and which always proves its worth in late July under grey skies, growing easily as it does in rubble in the terrace garden. 

I’m always amazed by just how rapidly these moths can flit from flower to flower and place their fragile flexible proboscis with such precision. Even where they’re missing a big chunk from a wing, as with this one. See here for more on how they manage it, from September 2017.

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To finish on a musical note, I’m including a cover recording of “On Raglan Road” by Sinéad O’Connor, whose sudden and untimely early death was announced this week. We came across this haunting track on a compilation CD, Common Ground, of “modern” Irish folk music many years ago.

The song has an interesting history since the lyrics are from a wistful autobiographical poem (“Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away”) written in 1946 by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh about his falling in love, at the age of 40, with a 22-year-old medical student, Hilda Moriarty, who happened to be living on the same street in Dublin as he did at that time.

Kavanagh changed the title of the poem to disguise its origins, using the name of his brother Peter’s girlfriend, Miriam, and much later had the idea of setting it to a traditional Irish melody, “The Dawning of the Day”. It became very popular after Kavanagh had asked The Dubliner’s frontman Luke Kelly to record it as a song, (including the phrase, albeit in a different context, “And I’m not making hay”.)

O’Connor’s clear voice and simple arrangement contrast dramatically with Kelly’s scratchier and more traditional take, and for me seems to match the lyrics and poem’s mood perfectly. I never tire of listening to it.

I’ve mentioned in this blog before how Kavanagh’s upbringing on a small rural Irish farm, with a father who also worked as a shoemaker, hugely influenced his poetry and writing, long after he’d left to live in the city of Dublin and make his name. Indeed Kavanagh’s quote below has long struck a chord with me and seems to mirror our recent times living in this place:

“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

Perhaps our modern world would be a better place if more people appreciated such simple things.