Green Garlic

THE WOOD, which we haven't visited for some weeks, looks fresher. Swathes of lush green Wild Garlic or Ransoms spread a little further each year amongst fallen Crack Willows, colonising an area that twenty years ago you might have described as meadow.

Hawthorn is bursting into bright green leaf at the edge of the wood, Blackthorn bushes are peppered with white blossom. Soft Grass carpets the ground on drier slopes beneath Sessile Oaks.

In open country, at the bottom of Balk Lane, a male Yellowhammer performs his 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeezz' song from the top of a hybrid poplar, his mate isn't far away. Every summer a yellowhammer sings here. It is a small scale habitat - a lane, rough verges, a small stream, the overgrown remnants of a hedge, a few mature ash trees and the surrounding pasture. I hope it never gets 'improved'.

I replant Marsh Marigold and Purple Iris in the pond. They have been sitting for a year in a small zinc bath tub I borrowed from my mother-in-law. Barbara says she remembers being bathed in it. I must have taken the odd dip in a similar zinc tub, because I vividly remember the metallic feel of the sides.

The queen wasp returned to the site of her nest in our neighbours attic. They despatched her with fly spray.

Hey, those hens aren't all bad are they. Jim, next door presents us with a bowl of bantam eggs. Considering all the garden pests and weed seeds they've consumed on our side of the fence, I expect this is a way of getting our own back.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail;'richard@daelnet.co.uk'