Even in death it looked perfect, spots on his chest as bold as a summer’s morning. It was a dead song thrush. The tiny yellow tips to the coverts and the faintest crease of like colour at the corners of the beak suggested a bird of the year, inexperienced in the ways of cats or windows. Yet what to do with something so beautiful?
First I had work. Our garden is split in three – vegetables down one side; a middle lawn running all the way to autumn’s only colour, a cyclamen patch in the shadows under the hollies; and on the other side, by the hedge, a meadow area that has been left entirely to steer its own course for the past eight years.
This last third is now rank and flowerless and in need of cutting, but at midsummer there were 15 wild flower species.
I am at a loss to explain why so much meadow has been colonised by marjoram. It self-seeded from a cultivated sprig elsewhere, but has come to occupy one whole section of the garden, even launching more satellite colonies to the lawn’s middle.
As the scythe blade gathered in all those brittle stems, there were one or two surprises: a lost beer bottle tossed in from a summer’s party and the scalp of a yellow meadow ant’s nest, whose owners, mercifully, had vanished underground.
What was shocking was the thick, powerful odour of the herb, a smell that somehow needs to come right into the nose and throat before being lodged fully, as if its dense oily qualities need air and moisture to flourish.
Mixing something of the kitchen and of the hospital, this great rising balloon of last summer’s breath permeated everywhere. Before settling down into the cleaner, simpler, sweet smell of cut grass and soil, it brought to mind its heyday: hoverflies in hundreds circulating that herb patch in a perpetual scatter dance of yellow and magenta.
I laid my song thrush down in the earth where all those life scenes and memories and scents arose. On the garden table the beer bottle stood as a totem of its only season. The cyclamens looked like lit tapers in the gloom.
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