Barrows

Barrows are practical.  Barrows are for barging up and down the plot.  Hefting, heaving, tipping, cleaning and finally putting away in the shed.  But even barrows can come to rest.

No evident post-modern irony - the straw scarecrow, the gnome made of flower pots, the notice proclaiming Welcome to my garden.  No disguises.  This is a working barrow in semi-retirement.

I sowed here before the spring drought.  Only the alyssum came up.  Never mind.  I lifted self-seeded calendulas from among the potatoes, some french marigolds came from a friend, the begonia from my husband's workplace and the cosmos from my family. 

My barrow is now static.  It has come to rest, like most things, close to the hedge, under the shade of the birch tree. 

Neighbouring marrows counterpoint yellow marigolds and the red ripening blackberries overshadow the begonia.  The cosmos garden grows from a rusting receptacle.

Rest in peace.

Water Snails

Snails come in all shapes and sizes.  Some come as bird food.  Earlier this week I saw a magpie fly down to the plot, pick up a snail and proceed to bash it on our shed roof.  

Some, in company with the slugs and the caterpillars, colonise our cabbages.

And some live in the water tanks.  Once in another hot summer, I saw the water level had fallen through repeated watering and little black pointy objects were adhering to the sides of the tank.  I peered more closely at them.  They were water snails.

I have no inkling of how they got into that bare environment.  It must be a boring life to be a snail in a water tank creeping up and down the sheer sides on one muscular foot, scraping up microscopic algae with a raspy tongue. I wondered, do they ever suffer from a snail population explosion?  It seems not, as numbers to my random eye appear constant.  Do they have any predators?  Probably not.  Our tanks, filled from the mains, never host anything else larger than midge larvae and the odd pond skater - another mystery visitor. 

Once, and let me use the passive voice, tropical land snails were found on our allotment.  They were captured and confined to a jam jar before being donated to a local school.  They were not small.  It is better that they occupy a large glass tank in a classroom with scope for labels, drawings and creative writing. 

Meanwhile, under the equilibrium that we currently enjoy, the magpies and other predators will peck at snails, conscientious humans like ourselves will scatter barrier pellets to deter them and in their tanks the water snails keep climbing, or stick fast, retreat into their shells and wait for the water to rise.

Bumblebees, Breezes and BMWs

A poem I once knew as a child, but cannot recall in detail celebrates the flight of the bumblebee.  Music and poetry pay tribute to the energy and ingenuity of these aerodynamic little wonders.  I love them.  I see them buzzing around the mauve and purple bells of our comfrey plant - all shapes, all sizes- busily being what they were made to be: beneficial bees. 

Sadly although bumblebees can land on and take off from nectar bearing blossoms with the precision of a plane homing in on the flight deck, there is one air current that they cannot navigate; the downdraft from the soft-tops that consider our little hill (gradient 1:10)  as an extension of Le Mans.  I notice the bees.  Slammed on to the pavement upended and undignifiedly waving their legs. I bend down and assist them into the prickly shelter of the pyrecantha bushes behind the cemetery railings.  They take a little time to reorientate themselves to being right way up, wings smoothed down and in place, all legs working. 

I rescue them for practical reasons - they are pollinators.  Also, I cannot bear to see them upside down. 

Next time you hear Rimsky-Korsakov's popular classic remember the BMWs and think of the plight of the bumblebee.