The may flowering is now almost over so that everywhere one looks the woods are a tide of young green. This is the season of maximum new growth. One can almost see the grass rising and, first thing in the morning, in the patches of longer stems, the dew, in the rising sunlight, glints like a cascade of diamond; the jewel nets of the Pure Land can hardly be finer. Dawn and dusk are magic times, when the light is near horizontal and takes on a spectrum of tints that envelope all in gentle pastel shades. Then night, with so many gems all its own. Last night I awoke in the early hours and my room was filled with silver. The moon is just past full now and so rises late, but after midnight one has no need of a torch, the three quarter orb sheds a deluge of luminescence.
Yet the day has even more glories. Still in the woods there are bluebells bobbing and a host of other flowers decorating the shadows under the trees. In many areas of our land where I can remember scrub and thicket we now have stands of newly mature trees, their canopy only allowing shafts of green light so that the undergrowth has now died back permitting a fitted carpet of tiny flowers to prosper and giving the whole the atmosphere of a holy temple, a dwelling for the gods of Nature, with upright trunks like columns worthy of the ancient Egyptians. Simply to pause in such spots and absorb the tranquility is a contemplation.
Sometimes nature makes one stop. Yesterday I was on my way to the garden shed when almost invisible, right across my path, three feet ahead of me, i discerned, amid the grass the long form of a pale green serpent. It was a couleuvre, somewhat more than a metre long, motionless. It would have detected my approaching footfall and decided to play dead for the moment. The coulevre is not poisonous. It dispatches its prey by constriction, like a miniature boa. What remarkable creatures there are all around. Its sharp yet timid eye watched unflinchingly, then suddenly ot was gone, into the bramble.
A couple of days ago I was sitting under the walnut tree close to the house with Tara the cat on my lap when suddenly she started up in fright, lept over my shoulder and bolted back to the buildings before I had time to grasp what was happening. A deer had run into the field. It was a large buck in rut and it cavorted its way toward the far corner belling heartily. The sound is somewhere between a bark and a bellow and Tara must have thought it to be an enormous dog. It disappeared into the trees, but one heard the continuing cries receding into the distance. I wonder that they survive, many of the locals being keen hunters, but I suppose some balance must be struck and there is certainly plenty of cover.
The walnut trees are beginning to recover from their frost trauma. A month ago they all optimistically came out in delicate new leaf and flower, but then we had severe late frosts. I'm told that these frosts killed off half the vines in Western Europe. The new growth on the walnuts all failed and turned black so that they are still the only trees with no green dress, but now I see that new leaves are at last starting in the topmost branches and the warmer sun will, no doubt, bring them out all the way down to the skirt in time. The walnuts are, along with the great oaks, the most magnificent trees in our woods and with their big leaves, especially in the young trees, they appear almost tropical.
So May is out and the seasons turn and soon summer will be coming in.
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