A final clearing of the Autumn meadow, sickle and push mower. Removing the surplus grasses grown up since the hay cut. Raking over. Continuing to scrape back the skein of mosses colonising the topsoil. Choking the seed-bank in the years of abandonment. Half-cast in shadow from the lowering sun. Even the noisy singers quieting down.
A bench in the meadow. Scrap wood sanded and hammered into two old stumps.
The usual observations (oft repeated).
Fragrant berry clusters. Sloe and juniper budding dark blue around the base of the cherry groves. Sweet scent of rotting and ripening apple. Swarm of small black insects drawn to the sap leaking from a recently fallen pine bough. The fray attracting giant blue-bodied dragonflies that sweep inaudibly about, hunting and feeding in flight.
This years unused fire pit stacked with off-cuts and branches and overgrowing.
A beetle I've never seen before dropping out of the sky. Landing on my knee. Its wings retracting into emerald green carapace.
Scything wildflowers and thigh-deep grasses. Anthoxanthum oderatum, Festuca rubra, Trisetum flavescens. This Summer ritual is known as the hay cut. We call the results arisings. The material left to dry in place, turned once to help the flowers loose their remaining seed, raked into piles to parch in the sun. Collected before the hay breaks down and fertilises the low-nutrient meadow soils.
Hemiparasitic yellow rattle tapping into coarse perennials, leeching nutrients, suppressing grassy matts and skirts. A self-seeding weave of wildflowers where the wood rise breaks, common harebell, heath spotted orchid, wood cranesbill. Abandoned orchard belts, reclaimed from the forest, leafing anew. Splits of native / non-native planting to increase biodiversity, habitat support, site resilience.