On the windmill meadow, above a green rind of grasses and below their fidgety seedheads in the rain is the dotty purpling of knapweed.
The jet stream divides August in Europe. As the south swelters in life-threatening temperatures, this side of the shower curtain is cool, wet and, after Lammas Day, thistly.
The rain has its own language. Sometimes loud, sometimes a whisper, but, from downpour to drizzle, rain has hardened the lushness and lustre of summer. Now the vegetation coarsens into green leatherette, exuding a stubborn bloody mindedness, thickening into harvest time. Huge harvesting machines lie idle in sodden fields, which are half cut, inebriate with rain.
What flourishes most is the thistle; an insistent kind of history where poverty shows itself, creeping, spearing, rising to its most beautiful expression in the knapweeds.
Centaurea nigra, the common, lesser or black knapweed, is a vivid pinky-purple flower like a stencil brush with wiry stems and sketchy leaves but otherwise un-thistle-like in its demeanour. I suppose the “knap” in its name refers to the tufty texture used by weavers of carpets or billiard table baize.
In sunshine, knapweed is lively with butterflies, bees and hoverflies, and even in the rain it scatters percussive notes of colour through the stiff verges. Its purple feels loaded with the uncanniness of the season, the dog days.
I wander a path along a headland between fields and woods wondering why the wheat ears droop instead of standing erect (a phenomenon that will surely be revealed in the Salopian Book of the Dead), and wondering why I feel I’m being followed.
A movement across the path and something scurries into grass. I open the sward to find a magnificent creature, muddied but with enough sheen to reveal it as the violet ground beetle.
Further along is a field mouse, eviscerated, with a sac of young exposed. Thistledown – a tiny capsule suspended within a craft of white filaments – twists hopelessly around on a spider’s web, straining to escape and join the wind getting up through the wood. Rain follows, softly.
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