Under high blue skies, where the path runs against the wood, there’s a hum like strip-light static. It comes from the wings of hoverflies and wasps feeding on ivy flowers. In hedges and trees the curious, yellow knucklebone jacks of the ivy flowers draw insects to a last-ditch nectar binge. This may be the insects’ leaving do. As the light is held in their wings like flakes of mica or shreds of cellophane, they may or may not know that the itinerant hoverflies, greenbottles, ragged small tortoiseshell butterflies, and whole sisterhood of wasps that have fed together on a succession of spring, summer and autumn flowers, are doomed.
Frost is forecast and, unlikely though it feels, winter is already in the hills. The Clee Hills and the Berwyn range way over in the west are topped with snow. While the insects make the most of their ivy flower moment, there is a louder, more insistent hornets’ chorus filling the air. A pair of chainsaws sing in the field. Trunks and branches are sawn and round by round, cheese by cheese, loaded on to a pick-up. There are two lime trees down. The other year a storm broke into the little grove of limes planted in the field more than 100 years ago. The trees had grown together with a single domed crown but storm damage bit a hole in it and over the last couple of weeks the winter storms Abigail and Barney have each poked a finger in, stirred it around until two trees fell out.
Who came up with these names for storms? It’s a new thing here, to personify weather events as if they were responsible, like terrorists, for the damage they cause. It feels like a public relations company acting on behalf of nature and, I suppose, fits its commodification. The drama of environmental goods and services needs a few villains with ordinary names to justify nature policing.
At the centre of the rounds cut from the lime trunk is the pith of an arcadian idea in which the grove becomes a theatrical backdrop for pastoral myths - nymphs and shepherds - a place for dreaming. Now broken, that idea may travel in the insect wings, in their buzzing restless lives, and a moment of dreaming in the ivy flowers before the end.
