I remember the mild spring following a cold winter was tremendous for apple blossom. Perhaps this has been offset somewhat by the drought which may have implications for the harvest.

 However there's a good crop on a couple of apple trees at the music school which are the remnants of an orchard from its heyday as a Victorian country house.

 I can vouch for the one shown above. I plucked it and ate it after taking the photograph and it was delicious!

 There are 280 species of Hoverfly in the UK which is 279 more than I can ID off the top of my head. However this looks like a Marmalade Hoverfly which is the most common. 

 

 Ragworts and Teasels thriving in the drought. Clearly a hot, dry summer suits them.

 

 The grassy meadows near Ickleford are parched. At one point a freight train ran along the adjoining railway line and it looked more like a scene from the Midwest of America. 

 This is good territory for butterfly spotting. To the right of the fence is an expanse of grass which slopes gently down to a marshier area on the left. I saw various species flitting around including Whites and Marbled Whites, Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers.

 However the grasses are usually quite flowery with Thistles, Knapweeds, Scabious et al but much less so this year due to the effect of drought. Photographing butterflies is considerably easier when they pause briefly to nectar on a flowerhead!

 The hedges were the most floriferous place to look on account of the Brambles. Even their flowering is not abundant and already going over to form a crop of not very juicy Blackberries. Anyway, here is a snap of a particularly woody Specked Wood:

 Musk Mallow (Malva moschata) is a species I see in the chalk countryside from time to time, it likes a well drained soil. I imagine they would have been more common before farming mechanised and herbicides became the norm. An archetypal 'cottage garden plant' from the days when cottagers would have propagated the prettiest plants from the surrounding area for their gardens.

 Bumblebees were busy on the flowers. I noticed they seemed to be ignoring the pollen dusted stamen in favour of nectar robbing i.e. extracting nectar from the base of the flower.

Drought or no the toughest plants tough it out.

 

Seeing a lot of Gatekeepers and they like Knapweed.

 

 Elecampane (Inula helenium) is a plant I've always meant to grow. Obligingly this one has self-seeded on the allotment from a handsome stand on the neighbouring plot.

 I. helenium is native to West and Central Asia but an ancient introduction on these shores. It was known to both the Celts and the Romans. Much plant lore is associated with the properties of Elecampane; herbalists regard it as medicinal and elves consider it to be magical.

 

 Long summer days open up the possibility of evening walks when the work of the day is done. Still sunny and the air is warm. Pint at the Half Moon on the way out, and another on the way back.

 

Wild Marjoram (Origanum vulgare) attracting butterflies... 

And bees...

 

 Our grasslands are parched but the wildflowers persist.

 

 Hemlock (Conium maculatum) I believe. Very poisonous, it did for Socrates!

 

 Phacelia tancetifolia sometimes called Fiddleneck. Green manure. Beloved of bees. 

 

 As the drought continues marshy areas are a good habitat to spot wildflowers. Species like Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulumaria) thrive in damp meadows.

 Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) flourishes in marshes, ditches and along the banks of streams, rivers and ponds.

 Walking through the Purwell Ninesprings nature reserve today the effects of the dry summer are evident even here. The chalk stream that runs through it rises nearby and the aquifer itself won't run dry. Nonetheless the area seen above is now a muddy crust whereas it would usually be a submerged part of the flood plain.

 

Psychedelic. 

 Weather wise this has been a good year for butterflies (in certain respects). 2024 was disastrous for insects generally, cool and damp from spring into summer. That was always going to have a knock-on effect: less butterflies so less eggs laid so less caterpillars so less butterflies.

 The warm, dry conditions thus far have been favourable for such butterflies as have emerged. But here's a conundrum. The rain last year made it made it a lush year for wildflowers but a dearth of pollinators to pollinate them.

 What I'm noticing in the countryside this summer is that it's not very flowery. For example where there were waist-high wildflowers on the Pegsdon Hills last summer now there are dry grasses. Not much to nectar on!

 Here in the UK we have an island ecosystem and a lot of weather. So I don't necessarily want to attribute everything to climate change but we seem to be experiencing extremes of downpour and drought. Rain and sun is what we need, not just one or the other.  

 

Comma basking.

 First sighting this summer of a Jersey Tiger Moth. Formerly a rare species beyond the South Coast, increasingly common in southerly parts of country. I began seeing them in Hertfordshire a few years ago though they have not appeared in numbers as yet this year.

 The summer solstice, the longest day. So it seemed appropriate to do an evening walk along a section of the Icknield Way, that ancient route across the English chalk. The sun was dipping below the horizon in fiery illumination just as we arrived at Knocking Hoe.

 Ivy Broomrape (Orobanche hederae) in flower. There must be a couple of hundred around the grounds of the music school -which is surprising.

 In the 1980s it was considered to be one of Hertfordshire's rarest wildflowers with only one known colony in a churchyard in North Herts. Moreover this was said to be the only site in the eastern part of England north of the Thames. (Ref. Brian Sawford's great book of 1990 'Wildflower Habitats of Hertfordshire')

 I wrote a longer entry on this subject last year [10th. June], suffice to say the Broomrapes at Benslow are an intriguing manifestation of a rare species.

 

 High summer- a shimmering haze of Ox-Eye Daisies.

Garden as habitat.

 Lavendula angustifolia 'Munstead' is a compact Lavender with vivid blue-purple flowers. 

 Like all Lavenders 'Munstead' attracts bees in profusion. For maximum bees it's worth planting one of the Lavandin cultivars i.e. Lavendula x intermedia which is the hybrid of L. angustifola and L. latifolia. They are the most aromatic and bees mob them. 

 

 Commuting into London every day this week I pass this field with a red haze of Poppies.

 

Two men went to mow a meadow (at the music school). Jif worked ahead of me with the brush cutter scything a path. I gathered up the cuttings with a pitch fork and wheelbarrow.

 By way of a contrast Jif keeps the main lawn cut short and stripey using a cylinder mower.

 Spotted this Jay perching on a bench in the garden at the music school. 

 

 By way of a contrast to the Common Spotted Orchid mentioned in my last entry here is the very uncommon Burnt-tip Orchid. Seen here at Knocking Hoe, one of only a handful of colonies in the UK. Neotinea ustulata grows on sloping chalk and limestone grassland grazed to a short sward. A niche habitat much diminished by modern agriculture. 

 There are 52 Orchids native to the UK (or 56 or 57 depending which source you refer to). The Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza maculata subsp. fuchsii) is indeed the most common growing as it does in a wide range of habitats including grassland, heaths, moors, woodland, hedgerows, wetlands, coastal areas, farmland and gardens.

Seeing lots of Red Valerian (Centranthus ruber) in the grassy clinker by railway tracks.

 

Brimstone on Bramble.

 

 Bumblebees are loving the wildly pretty Echium wildpretii.

 

 A short walk on a cloudy Bank Holiday Monday. I've started walks from this point since I was a child. The vista is fundamentally unchanged yet the land and sky is always different. 

 A wild corner of the allotment. Comfrey, Field Scabious, Sweet Rocket, Greater Knapweed, Red Campion, Bramble, Nettles. Those last two were there anyway, the Comfrey self-seeded from elsewhere on the allotment, the others planted now self-seeding as well.

 

 Quite a few years since I last camped on Dartmoor. Nonetheless I was pleased to read today that the right to wild camp on the moor has been upheld in a unanimous ruling by the judges of the Supreme Court. In fact Dartmoor has long been the only place in England where wild camping is legal.

 The four thousand acre Blachford estate was bought by a wealthy couple who subsequently sought to ban camping. That provoked a good deal of controversy but sanity has prevailed.