If you choose to see it that way, you might say that one of the upsides of the Covid 19 pandemic has been that it’s obliged us to cancel our usual travels and find places much nearer home. With all our favourite walking spots effectively out of bounds, we’ve responded by scouring the area around Bath for wildlife hotspots, the SSSI’s, reserves, and commons – often not much bigger than a few acres but which (we’ve discovered) are incredibly rich and full of things we’ve never seen before. All the while I’ve been lamenting the fact we can’t get into Wales or Cornwall to go plant hunting we’ve been neglecting the local riches. Today was no exception, and we found a few acres of calciferous grassland that hasn’t seen any fertilizer or chemical for best part of 300 years.
But first we had to go to the surgery for our annual MOT’s in which Madame fared better than me because for some reason I had an AF attack as I walked through the door and so – after three goes on one blood pressure monitor and a trip next door to see if a different type of machine would tell a better story, we agreed that the numbers on the dial didn’t look at all right and we would ignore them. That’s the first time I’ve ever suffered from white coat syndrome in my life, and within an hour my pulse and blood pressure were back to normal. I always suspected doctors made you ill and now I’m sure. The poor nurse got quite flustered and this meant her every attempt to calm me down made things much worse. I don’t know which of us felt most exhausted when I walked (carefully) out of the door. Anyway, enough of my cheating heart. Old age doesn’t come alone as my granny used to say, and she was right – there are thousands of us.
So after tea and Dundee cake, which is a sovereign cure for all ills, we drove about 4 miles to Bannerdown Common ostensibly for me to grab a few grass samples to sharpen up my I/D skills, and for Madame to seek out butterflies. Tonight I had to choose between writing and identifying my bag of grasses and I went for writing tonight and identifying tomorrow morning very early before Madame wakes up. There’s something so special about unimproved meadows that once I’d collected a dozen grass species we moved on to wildflowers, butterflies and just revelling in the beauty of it all. Madame came face to face with a roe deer stag and after exchanging surprised looks he darted back into the woodland – it was that kind of place, full of surprises.
I’m sure that there are ecologists who go about their work in methodical silence, but I’m a bit of a noisy so and so, and I’m inclined to do a little excited dance when I spot something interesting. Madame finds this dismaying as a cloud of departing butterflies sometimes accompanies my joyful exclamations. Botany is exciting – no argument! I’m ashamed to admit that I could have learned more plants three times as quickly if we’d taken our bicycles out instead of driving hundreds of miles in the campervan. On the other hand, although I’d kill for an hour at the seaside, I’m certainly not prepared to die for it so we’ll postpone murders and premature deaths until September at the earliest and stay local.
There are a long list of nature reserves within easy distance and with all our field trips cancelled at least until the autumn we’ll do it alone. Meanwhile the allotment has reached overproduction levels and we’ve realized that the intuition in April that three rows of runner beans was too many – was right, and we’re feeding anyone that can light a stove. I’ve made a shopping list of timber to repair and strengthen the water butt stands, and the temperatures look set to reach 30C later this week which will mean we’ll soon be processing tomatoes. Unfortunately a labelling mix-up has put several varieties into a glorious muddle, and today I noticed some wild aubergines growing amongst the cavolo nero. That’s what I love about allotments; for all the planning in the winter, by the time it gets to July the plot has its own momentum and we become followers, curious to know what will show up next.
