2009 Diary Samples Page

Extract from the Diary's Introductory Essay

The summer woods of a Highland home

by Sir John Lister Kaye, author, naturalist and the founder of the
Aigas Field Centre in the Highlands of Scotland.

 

By mid-July the long hours of daylight have done their work. The solar energy grabbed by hungry leaves has exploded into a jungle of luxuriant verdure. I call it the great green stain.

To begin with, when they first emerged only a few weeks ago, those greens were vivacious and varied, too many to count, hues as subtle as tweed, from the dark gloss fronds of hard fern and pine needles, through the lichen-grey-greens of eared willows to the startling, lime-juice opulence of larch buds. But these shades are as ephemeral as the buds themselves. Slowly, as the lengthening days yawn by and the envious chlorophyll continuously churns, the trees gradually merge to a universal wash of summer lawn, almost as if they have consulted with each other and agreed not to stand alone. They seem drunk with green energy; that first desperate growth spurt eases back. These are the woods that surround my Highland home: brooding pine woods, delicate birchwoods – dancing ladies someone once called them - alderwoods beside the river and the willow thickets that crowd the rim of the damp marshes beside the loch. They are the woods I adore and which have become the focus for my work and my life.

And now it is summer. Leaves have stretched to their fullest reach and they bask. The fiercest competition is over; they have found their place and accepted their lot at last, resting like a drunk who has had his fill and finds he has a full glass in his hand.

This is the season of excess. The world is gorged and fat full; cud-chewing cattle laze in August fields among grass too long to be kept in check by their rumbling guts and drooling muzzles. The first pyrotechnic burst of wild flowers has faded and gone, swamped by the mutinous shade of pressing foliage. Wood sorrel, dog violet and lesser celandine are nowhere to be seen and the northern marsh orchids have vanished from the moor. Their brief hour has passed, leaving only an invisible dusting of seed for another year, while locked in the mould of last year’s leaves they shore up their secret arrangements. In their place blousy foxgloves have erected spires of sensuous, lolling lips where, high on nectar and furred with pollen, bumble bees drowse from bloom to bloom. Now the path is hemmed by the tall umbellifer stems of sweet cicely. Its tiny white flower clusters dust my jacket as I pass and the warm air is piqued with an aniseed tang. High above the loch the tiny green heather leaves give way to a summer resurgence of buds, the first hint of the famous moorland counterpane still to come.

The insect host is on us; flickering swallows and house martins hawk the vibrating air and the moth-filled nights echo with the sonic prattle of brown long-eared and soprano pipistrelle bats. Hatches of mayflies and lacewings have stippled the loch like rain and then gone, vanishing as fast as they emerged. Bronze-backed shield bugs and metallic heather beetles have drifted through, a wave of tiny winged gems sent, it seems, just to feed the darting second broods of hungry grey wagtails sprinting and flicking across the dam. Stiff-winged, the dragonflies and darters hover over the water lilies and predatory tiger beetles – bright, long-legged emeralds - scurry across my dusty path.

These are the open-shirted bare-arm’d weeks which embrace the middle of our year. They are the splendid consequence of woods, of soils and decaying wood in which the bugs have harboured, slept out the long winter and now emerge to gild our Highland world with life and energy. These summer weeks arch across the humid, cloud-filled yawn between the bright summer solstice and the last call of the autumnal equinox. I catch myself muttering it softly as I stalk the familiar trail through the sighing trees, the trail now squeezed by hard-edged bracken fronds four feet tall: “Summer” I say it again, “Summer”. The word seems to mimic the season and lean on the mms: “S-u-mmmmm-e-r” – caterpillar-like, it has two entirely different ends with a fat, luxuriant, foot-dragging middle. As the old jazz song croons, “…those lazy, crazy, hazy days of su-umm-er…” - that’s where I’m heading today, away and into the mms.

These are the days when it is often easier to slouch in the long grass and day dream, than to seek out the natural history of my home woods. I wonder if the wildlife feels the same. I fancy some do. On the edge of the pinewood, in little parties of five to eight, the red deer hinds have grazed up to a secure look-out and settled down like me to laze, collapsing in the soft lilac haze of the budding heather, sleepily chewing the cud and watching their calves - now strong and part-weaned - skip and frolic until they too drop down to sleep through the afternoons at their mothers’ sides. As I lie and scour the hillside through binoculars I have to pan back and forth many times to find them. Among the broad expanse of greens, browns and purples so effective and surprising is the camouflage of their eponymous russet summer pelage that I have to wait for a movement – ears flicking at a troublesome fly or nibbling at a warble itch on their backs - to give them away…

Sir John Lister Kaye

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