Saturday; recording on 25th June

Another glorious morning, Lucy and I lingered on our walk through the fields, tall grasses covering Lucy as she stuck doggedly to my heel.  I picked elderflower to make a tea with, and we wandered through a magical world of grasses.  Small white moths, dark ones to flitted around and then a jewel alighted in front of me, the beautiful azure colour of a damsel fly.  No camera you will just have to imagine it in the mind's eye.  This is something I miss, damsel flies and dragon flies, though we live by a river, but I think the large overhanging trees shades its water from insects.  I also miss early in spring the annual emergence of frogs as they made their way to the pond and the little lizard like newt, something missing in this village I think, although once there were, presumably, medieval fish ponds in the fields behind the garden.

I look over the road to the field on the other side of Nigel, think years ago it was the old cricket field, and wonder if it is possible to buy it and create a small nature reserve.  Most small fields round here are covered with living lawn mowers, ie sheep, but this one has the tall grasses that once made up the old meadow lands, it must belong to someone.

Another thing I have noticed, I am not particularly good with names of trees but there are quite a few Ash trees around. Odin's tree, the mythical Yggrdrasil Tree and they have the magical nine leaves on either side of the twigs.

When Odin hung, speared, for nine days on the World Tree, he uttered the words that he had ‘sacrificed himself onto himself’. This stanza gives us a description of the unity existing between the Godhead and the Tree in the myths. To emphasis this connection, we find in old English the word treow, which means both tree and truth. Etymologically, then, truth and tree grow out of the same root. Subsequently, in the Norse creation myth, man and woman originated from trees. We are all the sons and daughters of the Ash and Elm tree: the first man was called Ask, born from the Ash, and the first woman Embla, born from the Elm. Their oxygen offers us the primordial conditions for life. Ask and Embla sprouted from Yggdrasil’s acorns, and so it is that every human being springs from the fruit of Yggdrasil, then to be collected by two storks ,who bring them to their longing mothers-to-be. In Scandinavian folklore, they say that children are born through the knot holes in the trunks of pine trees, which is another version of the same myth.  Taken from here

And another thing to note, I picked my first sprig of meadowsweet, it lay on the tarmac looking rather forlorn and the Himalayan Balsam is just starting to flower.