BUTTERFLIES

The rain this year that made me think that it was, perhaps, fortuitous that this house where I live is built on the highest point in the town, changed the patterns of activity in my garden. I didn't have to spend hours giving water to plants because the heavens were doing this for me but there was just too much. Plants in pots had their nutrients washed away so made no growth. Blossom was smashed off branches if it chose to appear just before yet another massive downpour; my medlar tree had this happen to it and so this year, for the first time that I can remember there are no medlars swelling up. Not that it matters, I suppose, because no-one wants that fruit; typically I might eat only a dozen or so out of 20 kilograms or so that the tree regularly yields - but not this year. So that's all to the good, I suppose, but I did like the tree when it was festooned with blossom. Now with the apple trees it has been a different story. The two apple trees that I have are old and tired and last year it seemed as though they were really on their last legs producing a few wretched fruit hardly bigger than acorns. This year they are covered with fruit that seem to be swelling, getting larger, every day. It's going to be a bumper crop all right. So, it's an ill wind ...

The newspaper carried a story about the absence of butterflies this year. The weather, so cold and wet, has more or less wiped out the butterfly population it seemed. But nature is cunning and finds ways of getting round the challenges to its policy of procreation. In my garden it did seem as though there would be no butterflies - because there were none to be seen. But what of the butterfly eggs or the crysalises (I have no idea how their life cycle runs from year to year)? I think they were just lying doggo waiting for the bad weather to do its worst because just as soon as this welcome spell of warm weather arrived so did, first of all, the Peacocks. There was the solitary Brimstone (see my earlier post) and there were lots of Peacocks; it was as though one cluster of crysalises suddenly went Bang and threw out a couple of handsful.

Peacock butterflies are common British butterflies. But not dead common. They are alive and well and living off my white buddleia.

So it was going to be OK for the Peacock butterflies. Well, then, after about a week another cluster of crysalises went Bang and then suddenly the Peacocks were in competition with the Red Admirals for buddleia juice.

Common or not are they not absolutely, wonderfully, gorgeous?

So that's the news on the butterfly front so far this year.

I will now celebrate the opening of the butterfly season with the words of a song that as far as I know has never been published. It was written by a couple of lecturers at the college where I learned how to be a good teacher for a concert. It is to be performed with a certain amount of arm-flapping.

THE BUTTERFLY SONG

In a Summer garden

Soft breezes blow,

Tell me, tell me, pretty butterfly

Whither dost thou go?

To spend thy hours

Is thy happy lot?

Sipping pollen from the flowers.

Sluuurp, Sluuurp, Sluuurp, Sluuurp

Or what?

Chorus

(This is where the arm-flapping occurs in the performance)

Butterfly

Butterfly

Flutter, Flutter, Flutterby.

I can be

If I try

Lovely as a pretty butterfly.

Flutter, Flutter,

Flutter, Flutter, Flutter, Flutter

Flutterby, Flutterby

Lovely Butterfly.