Impossible dragonflies

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It’s impossible to imagine dragonflies dancing over the water here as I look through icy reeds to a frozen Great Pond. But in July and August the air will throng with damsels and dragons hunting on the wing – for food and mates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A snow-laden dragonfly sculpture on the pond margins reminds me that summer belongs here too.

The charcoal grey branches of an oak tree outlined in snow look more like a woodcut artwork than a living tree. Snow plays strange tricks with perception.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snow has turned the jumbled shapes, textures and colours of a winter meadow into a stark monochrome landscape. The Common is all simplicity now: bare architecture of trees, clean white slopes. We followed the deep slots left by the hooves of roe deer, trusting them to pick a safe route through the drifts, forgetting their light-footedness and ability to leap yawning ditches.

I paused by a scrub island where adders bask in early spring, warming their bodies after a long winter sleep. Moss and bushes hide their hibernaculum underground. They must be coiled around one another now, among the roots of dormant vegetation, deep in suspended animation.

And finally we went to pay homage to a favourite veteran oak and see how it was faring in the whiteout. We found it full of character as ever. Anyone who can walk past without stopping to admire it has lost the sense of nature’s grandeur.

This beautiful Common - all mine to enjoy!




Pondlife

Towards the end of last winter I dug a pond on my allotment and planted a bird feeding station nearby. The birds arrived soon enough, gobbling up fat balls and mealworms while they raised their chicks, and sometimes visiting the pond to drink in the evening.

Ponds take a little longer to develop. I planted flag iris, marsh marigold and water mint around the margins and water crowfoot in the pond itself. Two pond skaters were the first sign of animal life but my excitement was short-lived: they disappeared two weeks later, probably eaten by birds. Red damselflies made a brief visit in May, followed by a flourishing of not-so-welcome mosquito larvae.

In mid-summer, the water suddenly cleared, revealing teeming colonies of invertebrates: pond-snails, worms and tiny beetles. Soon after, a sprinkling of duckweed coated the surface and blanket weed began to form beneath it. By late August, my early amphibian dreams were almost forgotten...

As I sat by the pond one day, removing blanket weed, a pair of eyes caught mine, protruding from the water under overhanging grass. A tiny frog! I experienced a childlike sense of wonder and gratitude that it should choose to live in my pond. Then I glimpsed a diving beetle, rowing back and forth between the bottom and the surface.

Two days later I returned to the pond with my partner and a camera. He snapped away, as I planted some hollyhocks and over the next hour we counted at least six frogs, some of them much larger than the first I spotted. One of them was a giant and quite unafraid of us as he lazed in the shallows.

The magic of creating a tiny ecosystem more than rewards all the digging and waiting.