Two o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest, drowsiest time of day, and the air is saturated with fragrance from a gnarled old lavender bush that sprawls over the garden wall. It carries more than 200 flower spikes, and every bumblebee and butterfly in the garden seems to have fallen for their charms.
Constant movement makes them hard to count but there must be at least 30 carder bumblebees (Bombus pascuorum). Stems flex under their weight like vaulters’ poles, as they explore each floret for a second, before moving to the next, and then flying to another inflorescence. They are possessed with relentless urgency, and lavender has them in its spell, offering easy-access nectar but only in tiny doses, compelling them to move from floret to floret to make their visits worthwhile. It’s an evolutionary trade-off between flower and pollinator workforce, a balance between floral energy reward and insect energy expenditure. This afternoon lavender offers the best deal in the garden.
A dozen green-veined and small white butterflies, similarly hooked, flit between flower heads with equal restlessness, pausing just long enough to uncoil their tongues and probe a floret. Rival males spiral upwards in an aerial dogfight, then flutter down like falling petals to resume feeding.
The spectacle takes me back 60 years, to the lavender hedge in my grandmother’s garden, listening to the soporific drone of bees and beguiled by the confetti of white butterflies.
Since then I’ve studied the science of pollination ecology and learned a bit about interactions between flowers and pollinators: how floral colour signals influence insects; how their visual spectrum is different from our own, so colours that enchant us are not those that bees see. Theirs is a parallel universe that we can interpret but never really perceive as they do.
Another thought occurs, on this sweltering afternoon, that perhaps lavender has me in its thrall too, embedded in my subconscious. I have always grown this plant.
The biologist EO Wilson has a word for empathy between humans and nature: biophilia. For some, perhaps, it is imprinted during childhood, just sitting, watching and wondering.
