Harrison - Summer: an anthology for the changing seasons

I f spring is all about looking forward, and autumn about dying back, summer surely is the present moment: a long, hot now that marks the sultry climax of the year. Roughly bookended by haymaking and the grain harvest, it is a time of fruition and plenty, of promises fulfilled. Springs generative riotousness slows and ceases, and a stillness settles over the land.

For many people summer is a time of leisure: days at the beach, or picnics in parks and gardens; long, fair-weather country walks. Often it feels too brief, or comes in instalments: we pine for the six solid weeks of sunshine we believe we always had as a child. But in wanting to recapture those days we risk missing the days we still have because what is that wish but a wish to be a child again, loosed from school, loosed from the house, and barefoot on the grass? Those elysian summers, polished to dazzling brightness by the flow of years, can never be recaptured; but we have this summer, however imperfect we as adults may deem it, and we can go out and seek it at every opportunity we find.

I hope this collection from The Wildlife Trusts inspires you to do just that. Like its companion volume, Spring, and the two that will soon join it, Summer features material submitted by members of the general public as well as new pieces by established nature writers, poetry, and extracts from classic works of literature. Here you will find glow-worms, and cuckoos ancient and modern; jaunts on sun-dappled rivers, and hobbies hawking for dragonflies; there are diving gannets and rare cliff plants; butterflies, sea-gooseberries, city gardens and the summer stars.

Haymaking and harvest are still key events for our farmers, but theyre very different occasions now than they once were. No longer is the labour of a whole village required to scythe, rake, ted, pitch sheaves to the wains and build the ricks; no longer do women and children glean the stubbles after. Many communities are losing their connection to the land; our countryside itself has changed, too, no longer timeless but subject to alteration and loss. Summer is no longer what it was not because we have grown up, but because we have lost perhaps half the wildlife we shared the world with when we were young.

It is not too late to turn things around, though, and The Wildlife Trusts are working to do just that. We can all play our part, by learning about the plants and animals we share the UK with, loving them for the joy they bring into our lives, and protecting the places where they live. Summer should be about abundance: it is our job to make sure we can hand down abundance to our children, for all their summers to come.

Melissa Harrison, Summer 2016

N ow day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests. In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail.

Another day far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.

The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge tiles the vast carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has accumulated in a century bends down the roof.

The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it has reached its fullness. Day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely tomorrow it will be fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year war over. The broad grass is full of buttercups gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the red cattle are under the elms, the unrippled water slides under sullen silvery willows.

The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small tracts of wood upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine, small leaf upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying continually in the hollow vale.

Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The oak-apples are large and rosy. The wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjars voice is heard as if the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come; the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the leopards-banes dead flower.

Now the pure blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after bell under the oaks and the birches. The yellow broom is flowering and scented, and the white ladys bedstraw sweetens the earths breath. The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn, and, behind that, a white mill and millers house with dark, alluring windows where no one stirs.

June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. The maple leaves and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red; the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper beeches, opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seems to be the sacred trees of the thunder that broods above. Presently the colour of the threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There is no wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain has traversed half a mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is swallowed up by the nearest pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the hard road and each drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. Great drops dive among the motionless, dusty nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden upon the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting road, and the echo in the hills. When it is over it has put a final sweetness into the blackbirds voice and into the calm of the evening garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass through it, under the hovering of the low-flying but swiftly turning nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the branch of red roses that hang heavily laden and drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dripping its last spray in the dew of the grass.