Ragged Robin is one of my favourite wildflowers; it’s so exuberant, so punky and so unnecessarily lacking in any evolutionary credentials for the disorganised petals of its flower that seems to be a message from nature to remind us that plants have never been there to massage our aesthetic sensibilities. Close-up like this, the petals suggest the dancing fingers of a group of witches. I’m reminded of Matisse’s Dancers but perhaps more by Roger Hilton’s famous 1964 painting “Oi Yoi Yoi”; so in-your-face and so Dionysian in its darker sense. This one was growing on the far side of a ditch and I was so keen to get the photo that I had to be rescued by Madame when I lost my balance and feared a muddy, and probably smelly, dive. I’ve fallen in a few rhynes (that’s a Somerset word for a drainage ditch, pronounced reen) in my time and wouldn’t recommend it for the faint hearted.
Anyway that was all a slow intro to the theme of this campervan trip to the far west of Wales overlooking Ramsey Island. I’ve brought a new camera with me – it’s an Olympus TG-7, the latest of six previous iterations, the first of which I took on the Camino. This isn’t a review; I paid for the camera myself and bought it on the back of many other reviews by people who know what they’re doing. It’s shockproof, waterproof to about 30 feet, and fully featured when it comes to aperture, shutter speed and ISO setting so very much a technical step up from the Pixel 6A phone I’ve been using for nearly everything on this blog. In fact it’s only 50g heavier than the phone so it’s supercompact, with built in geotag and GPS unit and for me the most important feature of all, it has inbuilt macro facility and offers in-camera focus stacking. On paper this is a serious piece of kit for a very clumsy person who falls into ditches trying to photograph perfectly common wildflowers and fungi. Of course other cameras are available – I’ve got a Panasonic G2 with a Leica macro lens but it weighs a ton, doesn’t do muddy ditches and takes ages to set up for a shot.
My first discovery on trying out the macro/focus stacking is that it really does need a tripod, but mine – a Manfrotto carbon fibre job with a magnesium ball head looks impressive but is just too heavy and vulnerable to life outside a studio so I’m looking around for something light and bombproof that can get the camera down to 1 cm above the ground facing directly downwards. I took this photograph of the seed head of a Rough Chervil plant in the van with the big tripod and it gives some indication of what macro + focus stacking will bring to the table.
We’re camping at the far end of the peninsula and the weather has been – let’s say – very Welsh; but when the sun shines all day, as it did yesterday and the sky is China blue, as you might see on the best porcelain; and the wind gives a brief respite from the storm the previous night (which pretty much emptied the campsite) then this place is as close to heaven as we’ll ever get. Yesterday we did one of our favourite walks across the fields to Whitesands Bay and dropped in on many of the plants which specialize in this kind of environment because we now know where to find them after many visits. There are numerous bogs and marshes hereabouts and one of the most important botanical lessons I ever learned centred on the importance of understanding the ecology of the place we were searching. We find Ragged Robin and Yellow Bartsia here because of the wet ground. Bogs and dunes – our cup was full! Yesterday we found Dwarf Mallow, thriving on a dry and sandy footpath along with Sand Spurry, both in their happy place. There were Southern Marsh and Pyramidal Orchids – although it was difficult to be sure of the first without entering the marsh; Purple Loosestrife, Kidney Vetch, Lady’s Bedstraw, Sea Carrot, Navelwort and the ever elusive Scarlet Pimpernel which has changed its family name from Anagallis to Lysimachia to avoid detection – but we were ahead of that knavish game.
But perhaps the most exciting find was the Stoat that crossed the patch immediately in front of us. Madame didn’t see it, and just as I was getting excited and pointing to where it disappeared, to my great surprise it came out and crossed the path again; a tiny cigar sized assassin – not about to be deterred from its business by two huge inedible shadows with the sun at their backs.
Is that the reason we love nature so much? Its capacity to redefine beauty? Like a beetle flying past, flashing iridescent green like a flying emerald, or the powder blue abdomen of a Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly – hunting the shallows of a pond? or a Stoat in pursuit of its prey?
As we waited for the bus home, we watched groups of long limbed teenagers learning to surf and playing football; falling in and out of love thirty times a day and trying to figure out what exactly being a grown-up entails. My heart says “it’s not what you think!” but I’m ill-inclined to march along the beach spoiling their best ever day with my old-man truths. When the bus finally arrived our driver took a minute interest in our various destinations and ignoring such minor inconveniences as bus stops he dropped us all off exactly where we wanted to go, (anyone for the supermarket?) He stopped for a pee in one of the caravan sites – because the council have closed all the public toilets in the town – a major problem for drivers on a ten hour shift – and then made an unscheduled diversion to pick up some passengers at St Non’s Well, whilst passing a free dog sweet to some walkers on the side of the road.
Goodness knows we have our own human parasites, predators and Dionysians; controllers and exploiters – many of them wolves pretending to be grannies – Red Riding Hood is, after all a story about humans not wolves; and the present election has been sheer torture as they strut their stuff – it’s been good to escape for a while.
