these images from the high meadows show why France was the home of impressionist painting.
It might have been a dog's life for some these last two weeks but some of us were having a good time. These pictures illustrate what we have lost by allowing our meadows and wilderness to be destroyed. This is a good picture to start with for someone who is green(ish) with envy
meadowsweet (the white one) and tufted vetch (the blue one, and a member of the pea family). Meadow sweet has two distinct fragrances and has been used for centuries to cover floors and make rooms smell sweet. It seems that the name is in fact a corruption of "mede sweet" and it was used to flavour mead. One fragrance is soft, and one is sharp, and this explains another of its names in Yorkshire, courtship and matrimony. What can this be referring to??
Kit Hill is covered now in a small, white flowered plant, heath bedstraw, a relative of woodruff and lady's bedstraw. There is a wealth of folklore attached to these plants (for example that the Virgin Mary lay on a bed of lady's bedstraw in Bethlehem because the donkeys had eaten the rest of the fodder) and they have many practical uses, not least of which was to put them in straw mattresses to make them smell sweet(er). Interestingly they also contain significant amounts of coumarin, an effective anticoagulant.
We paid another visit to the Wiffill outhouse of hornet horror to see how things are getting on. As is obvious queen hornets are surprisingly tolerant, but I think this is as close as we are going to get without risking a sting in the tail. Canine habit of snapping at things that buzz may be ill advised in this situation.
