Sometimes I just sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits*

The month of bees and birds and butterflies

May is the most glorious month, the zenith of the year. This post was intended to be a paean to its glories, but ten days ago Covid caught up with me and it was as though I had been hit by a bus. I am thankfully now on the mend, but I spent much of the fevered week fretting that I was missing the start of May and worrying what on earth I was going to do about this week’s post…

So please forgive me for a much briefer piece than usual. Instead I have collected past sketchbook pages, in which I have noted some of its joys, alongside photographs and filmclips to offer a peek into this special month.

I never sit still in the garden. While I often intend to ponder peacefully with a cool drink and a book, it never happens and within minutes I have spotted something that needs attention and I am off snipping and weeding and pruning.

But earlier this week, like a languid invalid, unable to concentrate on drawing, I sat with my camera on my knee and captured some of the moments that it is easy to miss. I watched the bluetits flit in and out of the box, barely a couple of minutes now between parents’ visits and soon a new brood will be off into the world.

I allow aquilegias to seed freely, where bees hang from their bonnets, and though alkanet is a thug to be kept in check, its cobalt flowers are worth the price. There are liberal sprinkles of mustard garlic, beloved of the Orange Tip butterfly, and honeysuckle to attract the Buff Tailed Bumble bees by day and the Elephant Hawk Moth by night. Everything is so alive, full of fresh green growth and energy.

An Orange Tip alights on Garlic Mustard

You can hear the thrumming of his wings! A Buff Tailed Bumble on cotoneaster flowers

In she comes…

and out she goes

Within the apple tree hole, I watched the great tits flit in and out, in their favoured nesting spot, as they have for many years.

The blue tits, nesting in the box intended as a sparrow terrace, though no one told them, have been feverishly feeding their young.

The first of the blackbird fledglings

At dusk field mice enjoy climbing the alkanet stalks and nibbling the flowers

Something to read

Sometimes books appear in your life just at the right moment. “Dear Reader - The Comfort and Joy of Books” by Cathy Rentzenbrink has sat waiting on my bedside table since Christmas, and this week when both “comfort and joy” felt in short supply, I began to read it. I have always loved books about books, but this goes to the very top of the pile. A memoir of a reading life, it reminds us of beloved favourites and nudges us towards those we might have missed. So many of the books she mentions mirrors those I read during my teenage years, notably Mary Wesley, Catherine Cookson and Francoise Sagan, and inwardly squealed in delight with recognition as we progress through her book filled years. The writer is such wonderful company that I raced through the first half, then forced myself to slow down, as I simply didn’t want it to end. If you love books, don’t miss this.

Something to listen to and watch

Another joyful presence is the artist Sandi Hester. Her paintings are exuberant, colourful and artfully naive and though she takes her work very seriously, she refreshingly doesn’t take her self too seriously at all and is an absolute hoot. She posts regularly on her YouTube channel, but I especially love this episode where she guides us through her favourite paintings highlighting their tonal and compositional strengths. She does so with such lightness, but there is much to learn here .

You can also listen to her conversation with Nishant Jain, of The Sneaky Art Post, in which she encourages us to keep “making bad art to make the good art” come through. It is an honest, invigorating and helpful reminder that not everything need be perfect, we just need to do it.

And to end:

For Their Own Sake

Come down to the woods where the buds burst

Into fragrances, where the leaves make havoc

of cloudy skies. Listen to birds

Obeying their instincts but also singing

For singing’s sake. By the same token

Let us be silent for silence’s sake,

Watching the buds, hearing the break

Free of fledglings, the branches swinging

The sun, and never a word need be spoken

Elizabeth Jennings, 1977

Thank you for your company as always and I hope to be back up to full strength by my next post. Enjoy the glories of May and I hope I have encouraged you to pick a pencil, pause and capture its wonders, or at least to sit still and notice.

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• Although a common phrase, I first heard it spoken by the wonderful, much missed gardener Geoff Hamilton who closed, I think, his Cottage Garden television series by sitting quietly and looking back on the garden he had created. Episode 1 is a particular delight with Suffolk “old boy” George Flatt sharing the secrets of his bounteous plot.