The end of the road, near Dolgellau
When it started to rain last week, a good month into a drought that had begun to hurt, it felt like autumn. By mid-summer’s day (according to one calendar) or the first day of summer (according to another) we’d already had more than a year’s average summer weather. Twenty lunches in the garden in succession breaks all records.
With the afternoon sun just perceptibly lower in the sky, the rainclouds and the cool damp air it felt like a different season or another place. Wales, for example. In the four months we have been stuck at home I have dreamed about our woods and the walks I know by heart after 25 years, not alas of residence, but of passionate engagement. Next month we will be able to go back to see hundreds of new trees planted and a new bridge, contrived out of old telegraph poles, spanning our little river. The great stone that it replaces was on its way to Hampshire when the virus struck.
The Snowdonia National Park (we are in it) has a project to get rid of the Rhododendron ponticum that springs up everywhere in the woods, smothering young trees and creating ideal conditions for the Phytophthora that is killing our larches. They undertook to poison all the ponticum. To my fury I have just heard that they have also poisoned the most prized plant on the property. I planted R. augustinii for its blue flowers, to match the bluebells in May, 25 years ago. Augustinii doesn’t look remotely like ponticum. It is a delicate, transparent plant with leaves a fraction of the size and entirely matt, with no shine. The plant was in a prominent place by a waterfall where a simpleton could see it was a deliberate feature. I was beginning to compare it with the beauty by the river at Bodnant. It is now a stump stained
blue with glyphosate. 25 years is not something you can refund.
As soon as we’re in the woods, though, under the beeches with the river rattling by and a whiff of woodsmoke from the chimney of our old stone building, cares will evaporate. I am at heart a woodland creature.
