Come on, admit it, we have had some lovely days even in recent times. Last Monday, September 1st, on a 100-miles trip around Meath, it could hardly have been better. Swallows still diving around, blue skies and fluffy white clouds; not a drop of rain. The leaves were not yet turning, not even the American red oaks which normally colour up at the first touch of cold. The big, sprawling yellow buddleia that nobody has bothered to contain, was alive with butterfly and other life. The little John Downey apples were showing the first signs of colouring up. The blackberries were here and there, still red, elsewhere black as black can be, and succulent. The haws were turning.
Already the roses had developed into hips; long, bottle-shaped in the case of Moyesii, or fat rough things from the rosa rugosa or just the ordinary ovoid from the wild ones in the hedges. The most exotic thing of all is the leycesteria, sometimes called pheasant bush (and pheasants have been seen at them), with their long, say, three-inch complicated flowers and fruit, purple to black. Plant one and it won't be long before you find them adorning and then cracking stone gate-pillars or wall-tops. For the birds, anyway, take them away to eat or toy with. Nothing doing from the quinces. Every year you swear you will root them out.
The two mulberry trees at any rate produce fruit, even though it is miserably small. But the elder, weighed down with fruit and the blackthorn doing its best with purple sloes. So the dreadful colvolvuluos is showing its white trumpet flower everywhere, and the nettles are going fine, and the squirrel have suddenly interested themselves in the big cones of the stone pine or pinus pinea. These animals are not protected, though the red are.
A lovely day, enlivened by the colourful scattering children in their trainers and track suits and what-not, as two schools empty out after their first day back. The river? Oh, it runs brown and heavy, maybe taking away more of the Moynalty's detritus of dead fish, dead invertebrates, dead everything, fish need to eat. And the relevant Minister seems to have left this Boyne system out of his catchment play.
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