Last week was quite something, in this insignificant part of the world.

Culminating in me managing to watch sunrise on the summer solstice from the peace and quiet of our shepherd’s hut. A first for me, and an evolving couple of hours of natural beauty. From 4.15 am, when I quietly slid out of bed, until I made it back down the hill, once the first soft pastel dawn light had been displaced by the sun’s growing warmth, and the meadow basked in golden light.

It was a magical time, with fabulous views across the largely silent, verdant Carmarthenshire landscape. The dawn chorus muted in the valley below me, and as a sign of recent times, no cockerels and very few temporarily separated ewes and lambs were calling across these scenes. This, simply, seems to be a slowly ageing and morphing agricultural landscape, with fewer livestock and more trees.

I was a little surprised that the occasional transatlantic jet was winging its way East so very early on a weekend, in the direction of the rising crescent moon. I reckon that some passengers might have chosen this flight just to get their own special view of dawn on this Saturday morning. Assuming they’d booked their seats on the port side of the aisle.

(And of course I didn’t then know that simultaneously, a group of other more covert flights were crossing the Atlantic a little further south, setting off from Missouri at 00.01am and probably also enjoying some special sunrise scenes. We woke to that news a full day later, as rain was falling, and those seven stealth jets still hadn’t returned to base after their own very longest day. A midnight hammer, perhaps, though history may reach another verdict). 

Fortunately, for now:

“… we were off the map, as Gods, ghosts and the lost are.”

(Mark Wormald – From “In Translation”) 

That morning of June 21st 2025 was indeed a special moment in time. Which, just like this Hans Zimmer track ‘Time’ (composed for the film Inception) from the latest stunning new ‘Firedove’ album by organist Anna Lapwood, built slowly and gradually to create an amazing experience.

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Rewinding to the beginning of the week, we’d enjoyed our penultimate weekend of yet more lovely garden visitors, who mainly experienced dry weather. Though cloud and light rain spoiled things a little for the Sunday afternoon arrivals, as well as hastening the leaching of petal colours in Fiona’s flower bowls, above.

Monday morning was all change, again, as we woke to warm sunshine. A chance for me to go and gather my last batch of daffodil seed from the single form of N. poeticus which had set seed so well, but only just matured. I walked back through the crazy croquet lawn just before lunch and heard, then saw, this swarm.

Seizing their moment on this glorious day, they were massing in the air, just above the vacant, but scouted hive which they’d been staking out for a couple of weeks. I’m not sufficiently expert in such matters, but suspect that the bees that robbed out this failing colony, which I mentioned in my previous post, might have immediately started to raise new queen cells (in their mother hive) as soon as they’d found this attractive potential new home with its pre-built wax combs.

Then spent the intervening period both cleaning out the empty cells and sprucing the hive up, as well as ensuring that by simply being present on site in numbers every day, from early until dusk, they avoided another swarm moving in and occupying the hive, before they were able to move in. A queen egg takes about 16 days to turn into a larval form, pupate and then hatch, so once the cells were sufficiently advanced – and the perfect hot sunny day came along, the swarm could leave their old hive, with their existing queen, and move straight into this new, prepared home.

Maybe this is what happened, but maybe not! All this is speculation, but whatever, it was once again a real drama to watch them land and enter their new home within half an hour or so.

By the evening, foragers were already returning to their new base with abdomens laden with nectar, dragging them along the landing board. And with even better timing this year, the bramble flowers are blooming early and so there’s a wonderful nectar flow for them to exploit and use to recreate a store of honey and resources to get them through the weeks and months ahead.

Their timing though was perfect – a day earlier and our garden guests would have walked right past this bee maelstrom, since the path passes within a few feet of this hive.

The weather morphed again with some damp spells and then a much heralded heat wave appeared in all our forecasts. 3 days of guaranteed hot sunshine, with winds, and temperatures up to 28 degrees C. Perfect for hay making (and for another swarm which moved into a hive vacant since late last autumn: I was otherwise occupied and missed the actual fly-in, but with minimal pre-scouting, they had safely relocated by the evening to this, their new home, when I’d checked the hive, as I do, for any signs of activity).

I started cutting early on the Thursday morning, tackling the least floriferous far section of the upper meadow, before taking the BCS Power scythe down to the lower meadow. I’d planned to cut some small sections there, but am always conscious of how much I can manage to hand turn and bring in – vastly more effort than the initial cutting.

On my way down through cae efail with the scythe, I was met by Fiona heading back up the hill. She’d spent the morning stacking up all the leftover hay from this winter, to maximise space for the new crop in our 2 sheds. She’d noticed, unfortunately, a modest wasp nest in the lower shed, and thought it seemed inactive, until tossing one of the last bits of hay in front of the nest triggered a response: a wasp flew out and stung her on the arm. Immediately retreating, this news prompted me to curtail my cutting efforts, since taking out the nest was now an additional job on my to do list.

This necessary halt in cutting proved to be fortuitous, since the weather turned incredibly hot, and hand shaking the cut hay was more tiring than I’d thought it was going to be. Still, it was perfect hay making weather, and the light crop was drying very fast. However, as is nearly always the case with West Wales haymaking, by teatime the forecasts had changed. Rain was now expected on Saturday morning. The heat was really on.

We woke to grey skies the next morning, little wind and soon the first of a few very light showers fell. There was no point doing anything until the rain stopped. The clouds began to break up just before midday, and hay making was back on. It would just have to be completed by that evening!

So two more hand raking/rolling sessions, followed by hay pushing into big piles, bagging up and dragging the bags across to the hay shed, meant we had lovely hay inside within just 32 hours of cutting. Quite a rarity in these parts, and only possible because the crop is so much lighter than it used to be.

The very small lower meadow crop was still too damp, so we bagged it up, and Fiona’s dried it out in the now wasp free shed, with daily tossing.

There’s always time to enjoy the late evening light filtering through the flower and seed heads. A stunning vista with the dabs of flower colour amongst the sea of already seed- shed, sweet vernal husks

The floral diversity and profusion in these meadows is now phenomenal. Every year seems different, and this year the dominant flower through the middle of June has been the strong yellow of Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata. Also known as flatweed, or false dandelion, its flowers do indeed look superficially like dandelions, but are much taller, and more prolific with a single plant having multiple stems, bearing flowers which appeal to many insects, and once over, progress to dandelion-like clock seed heads. Should times get really hard, it’s worth knowing that the deep tap roots can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute. Apparently.

Most of both our hay meadows are dense with these rich golden flowers, and I think they might be persisting a little longer than normal, because the brambles have flowered so early. Given this option, many bumbles and honey bees will switch to their nectar-rich flowers, and much else is ignored.

A closer look at both our meadows also highlights the consequence of when different sections of the fields were cut last year on flowering richness this year. And maybe even species survival. I hinted at this concept in my last post where I mentioned the idea of (self-induced) plant suicide.

I’ve just finished reading the excellent “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth’ by Zoë Schlanger.

For anyone interested in thinking about the extraordinary concept that plants seem capable of significant “decision making”, and have sensory and response mechanisms comparable to many animals, I’d recommend this book. I’m sure other books cover this topic, but this is well written and references enough of the very recent research work that’s been carried out on relevant botanical investigation to make me full of awe and wonder.

The author spends a lot of time (and pages) grappling with her own, and the scientists she talks to, views on what it might mean if we come to accept that plants possess a degree of “intelligence”, or can, for example, “see”. She explains that some plants can certainly count, and can definitely “communicate” with others of the same species at distance through the release of green volatile organic compounds. (Some of these compounds also seem to impact on positively on human health, though awareness of this is still in its infancy.) Plants can also attract pollinators in all sorts of “clever/sophisticated” ways, as well as deterring predators. All very necessary for life forms that, in the main, don’t have the ability to move and change location if the going gets tough. Many plants can recognise their own genetic kin, and have been observed behaving differently and more favourably both above and below ground, if the plants nearby are related to them.

Whilst many such abilities have recently been proved beyond doubt, exactly how the plants manage to do this, often hasn’t been determined.

Two of the striking stories for me were firstly the studies that showed that a Venus Fly Trap exposed to anaesthetic ether, is unable to respond to a fly triggering the trip hairs inside its jaws – it is, to all intents and purposes, anaesthetised. Yet, of course, it doesn’t possess nerve fibres, or a brain. So why does the ether affect it in this way? Put it back into normal air, and it soon manages to function normally.

Or consider the climbing Boquila vine, growing in Chilean forests, that is able to change its own foliage to mimic the leaf shape, colour, size and venation of the host plant it clambers up, with remarkable accuracy. Even managing to look like ferns, or the recently introduced creeping buttercup leaf – should it happen to grow close enough to carpets of that growing over the forest floor.

The scientists are split on how the vine manages this. Can the plant “see”? Or is the necessary information about the host foliage being transmitted to the vine through airborne bacteria or other micro-organisms associated with the host plant? Both hypotheses would seem to smash our ideas about what plants are capable of.

There’s a very clear, short YouTube discussing this, below:

 

It seems strange to me that Homo sapiens, the “wise or knowing” man, can do all the technologically amazing things that are now possible – including, yes, flying multiple stealth bombers across oceans and back, dropping mega-ton, rock-penetrating bombs, and yet has spent so little time or effort bothering to try to work out what plants are capable of, sensitive to and responsive to. Schlanger’s book explores why such research has been a long, slow haul, but is at last shedding light on the amazing world of our vital “light eaters”.

Most mechanised hay making will involve removing all of a field’s crop in one go. Perhaps our variable piecemeal haymaking gives a little more insight into how the various species respond to being cut down in their prime. Or even before. In a mass assault on their foliage, worse than any possible animal grazing event. This is such a huge fascinating subject that I’m only scratching the surface of it here, but do read this book, or listen to this podcast for a brief discussion between the author and Chris Morgan. Scales might fall from your eyes. And you might marvel a little more as you walk around your garden or the landscape, at what is going on, unseen and unknown, beneath the superficial beauty.

I’m left with the thought that even if I deeply yearn (as I do) to understand a little more about why plants in our meadow behave as they do, waxing and waning and drifting around, I’m doomed to failure. The complexity of this system, this vast community of leaves and shoots of different species of plants, with the myriad fungi, micro-organisms and invertebrates they interact with, all subjected to the vagaries of a very variable and changeable climate are simply beyond reductive scientific explanation.

As Schlanger puts it in her final brief paragraph:

A single plant is a marvel. A community of plants is life itself. It is the evolutionary past and future entangled into a riotous present in which we ourselves are also entangled. (bold-sic) This stretches the mind. It gives us the chance to see the system in which we live.

I’ll leave the subject with a final discovery, that has been worked out. I first wrote about orchid seed germination and butterfly orchids and included some illustrations of its flower spike back in 2015, in a local meadow. Around the same time, a friend allowed me to collect a few orchid seed pods from her meadow. Some might have been from butterfly orchids – it’s not so easy to distinguish species once the flowers are over and the seedpods have matured. The dust like seed was carefully scattered over the upper hay meadow, and I then waited until 2021 to find the first butterfly orchid flower appear in this meadow.

The following year another single flower appeared, then 4 in 2023. 2024’s dire weather summer saw none emerge. So there was great excitement when I counted 18 different butterfly flower spikes, dotted around many parts of the meadow this summer, even if, as with many other orchids after this exceptional sunny and dry spring, the flower spikes were a little shorter than in the past.

The YouTube below shows just how special and numerous all the orchids have been this summer.

I took a few photos of the butterfly orchids and was fairly certain that they were the Greater Butterfly orchid, Platanthera chlorantha. There is another generally more widespread, Lesser Butterfly orchid. The two can be distinguished by the relative shape of the flower’s mouth, with its paired pollinium (plural – pollinia). These are the coherent pollen aggregations that orchids possess which allow pollen to be transferred en-masse between flowers, rather than as separate grains, which is the case in most flowers. The Greater Butterfly has the pollinia in a converging  A shape, in the Lesser they sit more parallel.

But I wondered why they were called butterfly orchids, since they don’t look much like butterflies to me. I read a little more and discovered that it was indeed because some thought the flowers looked like butterflies dancing in the field. In fact, there is another link with lepidoptera in the way that these flowers achieve pollination. They have a delicious scent, which grows stronger at dusk, courtesy of a mix of complex volatile organic chemicals, including alcohols, which the flower synthesises and releases.

It’s worth clicking on Wildflowerfinder.org for some excellent detailed photos of the internal flower structures, together with more about some of the nectar floral components, listed below, which combine to give the flower its delicious scent. And who knows, maybe all those alcohol molecules add to its addictive nature. Apparently some moths get so hooked on the scent or taste they will visit flowers so many times, they’ll end up blinded (see below, as to why!) :

β-Ocimene – trace; 1,2-HexaneDiol-Benzoate – trace; Santolina Triene 01%; Nerol 0.5%; α-Carene 15.6%%; Benzyl Acetate 0.01%; Lilac Aldehyde 15.6%; Lilac Alcohol 2.6%.

It’s well worth getting down on your knees close to a flower, should you ever get a chance, to smell this sublime example of natural perfumery, as I have when the slugs aren’t around. Together with their white colour, this scent attracts medium sized night flying moths, like the Silver Y, Beautiful Golden Y, and Burnished Brass which are some of the few insects with tongues of the ‘right’ length to reach to the base of the long spur which projects from the back of the orchid’s flower.

(Silver Y visiting Geranium flower, below)

I only noticed the obvious nectar sitting at the base of this tube after blowing the macro image up on screen. So far, so simple.

Then I discovered the excellent review article, written by moth and orchid enthusiast Mike Gasson, of the Hardy Orchid Society. This explains that the pollinia are connected by a ‘stalk’ to a sticky pad, which won’t stick to most parts of a moth’s body since it’s covered in hairs or scales, which would break off with the weight of the structure. They’ll only stick to the compound eyes, or the proboscis. Hence the 2 different anatomy layouts of the pollinia: in the Greater, the pollinia’s linked sticky pads are designed to stick onto the visiting moth’s eyes, and on the Lesser to the moth’s proboscis. The pollinia project from the eye via the flexible stalk, which bends in just the right way so that when the moth leaves this flower, and flies to another one, the pollinia is presented in the right position to be liable to touch the female stigma of this other flower, and thus transfer the pollen.

This method of pollination was first proposed by Charles Darwin and relies on two factors – that the moth’s proboscis is just the right length to reach the nectar, but not too long, or the moth’s head won’t be far enough into the flower for the eyes to touch the sticky pads which are connected to the pollinia. And secondly the eyes need to be the right distance apart to touch the sticky pads.

If you read the whole of the pdf link, and look at his images, you’ll see a couple of moths which the author caught in a moth trap close to a colony of Greater Butterfly orchids in a wood in Norfolk, which show just what the eye-adhered pollinia look like. Another remarkable story of plants, insects, and their mutually beneficial evolutionary dance.

Before I knew any of this, and before I’d even started to collect tropical orchids of various types, kept in a grotty conservatory in our Bristol home, Lionel Richie had recorded ‘Stuck on You’, a single from his hugely successful 1983 album ‘Can’t Slow Down’, which sold 20 million copies worldwide. And which went on to become the first recognised platinum sales album, after passing the 10 million sales threshold. Still worth another listen after all these years.

It seems an appropriate musical interlude to slot in at this point, and the evergreen Richie still regularly includes it in his shows, with what seems to a be a very stable band line-up.

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As if all of this bee, wasp and moth drama wasn’t sufficient for one post, yesterday afternoon, around 4.15pm I decided to have a breather and take ‘The Light Eaters’ outside to try to finish it quickly. I NEVER take a book outside to read, but it proved to be fortuitous timing. Immediately I opened the door there was obvious loud bee noise. A cloud of bees were milling around the slate-line just above the door, with bees diving in between the rafter ends of our gutter and soffit-free roof. Oh dear. My initial thought was that a swarm had moved in, but on reflection I suspect it was more likely to be a large number of scouts sussing out a potential nest site in between the slates/felt, and the insulation/plaster board. As I watched, the line of bees extended further down the slate line and some seemed to be concentrating on exploring another inter-rafter space. Then I noticed another, grapefruit sized active wasp nest, sitting at this point on the wall plate. Directly above our cobbled path.

Another one of those quick decision moments, when regrettably I opted to use a foam based insecticide to repel/disperse the bees, and eliminate the wasp nest. I’m afraid I’ve heard too many stories of honey bee colonies in roof cavities, which once established are almost impossible to remove. So better to nip the issue in the bud. In all our years here, we’ve never had them explore this space before, as far as I’ve been aware. Within a couple of hours, all the bees had given up and dispersed, and today there was no return, and the wasp nest was inactive too. Perhaps we need to replace the anti-house sparrow chicken wire, stapled above the wall plate, with finer, anti-honey bee and wasp mesh to prevent a recurrence.

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I should mention that following the excellent pollination that our apricots enjoyed as a result of honey bees being able to access the green house for many days in late February/early March, we’ve been enjoying a bumper crop of many kilos, for weeks since the first ripened in early June. The video from 2 years ago, below, gives an idea of what the bees can sound like, even this early in the year, given a weather window for them to get out and forage.

This bumper crop was despite radical fruit thinning in mid-April, which took me over 3 hours, working over just two trees, and picking off hundreds of surplus, touching fruit. If left, they would inevitably result in rapid botrytis destroying the fruit in a humid greenhouse environment.

Finally, we’ve been stumped by what to make of this shiny object that appeared on the distant horizon as the sun set last week. Climbing up the hill didn’t help, since the altered perspective hardly changed its appearance, seemingly hovering above the tree-line.

On maximum magnification, one can almost make out some sort of a tower structure at the centre of the highly reflective ‘wings’. But what on earth is it? It’s been visible on more than one day, so sadly isn’t a mystery UFO, but for now it has us both stumped.

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A few views from the garden in June to finish, and show that it’s not just the meadows and wild life that has been catching my eye recently.