Willamson's Weekly Notes - Oct 14 2009

Glorious little girl she has been, fluttering from berry to berry, bingeing on the fermenting wine. Who can blame her? For she has a long dark winter ahead in sleep from which she may not emerge alive.

She is less swarthy than her male friend who has also drugged himself up to the eyebrows. Her make-up of lines and squiggles is just that tiny bit less obvious than his.

She still is a girl, for she has not mated and will only do so next spring if they both survive until March or even April.

They have both been enjoying the September Indian Summer period, which we do so often get with the Harvest Moon.

If we also get a fine period for the Hunter's Moon which is the next, the pair of them might almost be seen galivanting about in the warm places and sun-traps among the lanes and hedgerows and orchards.

Then I leave out for them a few cidery apples although most of these are kept for the birds in winter.

Autumn orchards with their scents of fermenting windfalls are a memory of childhood.

Then I used to watch the wasps and hornets, red admirals and peacocks getting tipsy in the mellow days.

Keats' poem Ode to Autumn came easily into my brain as a result of all this first-hand knowledge.

It all made sense where the curious coded messages of Gerard Manley Hopkins had to wait until adulthood. Commas have been fairly abundant again this year.

Back in Victorian days they became rare, and confined to the Welsh borders. Then during the 1920s they started to return again suggesting that they have a natural wave and decline that may be a century wide.

I have always wanted to see the other members of this wonderful family known as the Vanessids.

We know the peacock, red admiral, small tortoiseshell as autumn favourites in the garden.

We even occasionally see that lovely insect from Sweden in autumn: the Camberwell Beauty with its magenta wings and big cream border. That has often been known feeding in clover fields in Sussex in autumn.

But what about those four tropical family members that have been seen and indeed captured in Britain in the past? The zebra, the blue pansy, the small brown shoemaker and Albin's hampstead eye. The zebra emerged from a bunch of bananas at Eastbourne in 1933.

Another accidental immigrant in fruit was the shoemaker at Covent Garden in 1935.

But the blue pansy seems to have flown here all the way from Africa in 1950.

You just don't know what is going to happen next in the world of nature but it is often exciting.

Meanwhile I am enjoying some intimate moments with the dusky damsel in my garden.