Flowery June! Poets and writers wax lyrical about this month in England. Here on the Isle of Wight, the now vibrantly green countryside has exploded with teeming life. Few of us islanders would wish to be anywhere else in this most beautiful of all months.
I am carried across the threshold of June
As a bride, wearing a flowered gown,
Is ushered down the isle of May
On the arm of lavender perfume
Vowing promises of wedded bliss,
Wearing dappled lace, and sweetly smiling
Through her dew-misted Delphinium veil.
Spinning butterflies in drunken delight
Sip nectar from the lily's blushing lips
While petunias pied, who partied all the day
Reluctantly close their eyes to sleep.
I give a lover's sigh to June's splendour.
Lost in her hay meadow eyes, I surrender
An adoring lover's grass-green virginity!
Annie Johnson © June 9, 2005
Hedgerows bloom with the pink and white of wild rose, the yellow and red of fragrant honeysuckle, the white florets of blossoming elder, the dancing daisies, and buttercups.
Within the hawthorn and dense blackthorn thickets, the dunnock and the finch are rearing their young, while in the fields nearby swallows swoop to catch a meal of juicy flies to take back to their nesting young in some barn roof. The chalk downs that stretch the length of the island in a southern spine of grassland are a wonderland of broad coastal vistas and birdsong now. My friend Chris, a local schoolmaster, tells me he can walk the length of the island from east to west to a symphony of skylark music.
On Wight's river banks, estuaries, saltmarshes and mudflats , waders and sea birds are breeding and enjoying the rich diversity of marine moluscs and grasses that the island provides.
The sky at night is never really dark here in this lovely month. Sunsets last in slow, lingering pastels that turn from palest blue to deeper reds and finally indigo as the sun slides below the western horizon late each evening and slides back up in the east to give us early dawns of palest orange.
Sunset and evening star are my favourite time of day now. The day is silent but for the last call of the blackbird, a dog's bark down the lane, and the screaming swifts that spiral, wheel, hang for moment, and then swoop in the gathering dusk above my village, taking insects on the wing.
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