BUTTERFLY BANQUET

I have never been particularly partial to rain, just thinking that it was an okay element of the whole weather package. Inconvenient at times, but mostly refreshing and a great excuse for staying in reading a book. I’m becoming very personal here, I realise, noting a good excuse for reading books. Thankfully, I don’t need it anymore. I even think back with mild forbearance on the time I had a very nice copy of Francis Bacon's Essays thrown at me from a first floor window. Time is a great healer. It has also renewed my sense of rain by the length of the drought, which seemed to be without end. I’ve watched expectantly and listened in envy to the thunder and lightning passing by in the distance, letting off great splashes of water in neighbouring areas, but only little in Calvesgarden. Until this morning, that is, when an intense shower caught me by surprise bicycling home from Harry’s. The rain just lasted a few minutes, but it was quite spectacular, more like a body of horses relieving themselves from the sky in jets as thick as thighs. It left me drenched to the bones, but minding it not one bit.

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POINT-DE-VUE OF THE ROCOCO GARDEN

I came across a horticultural observation by Oswald Spengler “that the most significant element in the European garden is the point-de-vue of the great rococo park, upon which all its avenues and clipped hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to loose itself in the distances. A feeling for the faraway is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. The baroque park is the park of the late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park brings us a vision of a midsummer noon. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality.”

Although I have only a quarter of an acre under hoe with hedges that don’t need much clipping, I can still identify with the gardeners of great rococo parks because the Wolf Sound at the end of the garden allows the travelling of vision to the coveted loosing of itself in the distance. The big old apple tree stands too close to the axis of the garden to allow for a perfect point-de-vue, but I treasure the apple blossom too much to do anything about it.

I seem to have always been more interested in having many flowering shrubs and trees in the spring than in anything else about the garden. The roses and lavenders are the perfect bloomers of the summer time, of course, but the only other shrub blooming right now is the beautiful purple butterfly bush (buddleia davidii), which is attracting scores of butterflies. I’ve seen peacock butterflies, small tortoiseshells, red admirals and cabbage whites swirling around it in the bright sunshine. I’m quite ready to settle for this smaller scale Renaissance vision of a midsummer noon, keeping up the rococo ambitions of the garden and forgetting about any baroque ideas like ruins and gnomes. Hopefully, it won’t make the calendar entries too dull in the coming months.

The top photograph was taken by Linda Walls for her beautiful Butterfly Garden Journal. A must for butterfly connoisseurs.