Sensual overload at the summerhouse
Woke up early at the beach hut on Saturday to find myself a stranger in a strange land To explain: a new bank of umbellifers (I think) has swamped the southern border, with the silver birch and blue cedar almost disappearing under a 5ft wall of white pollen. The rugosa, too, was struggling in lush growth. The woodpile nearly obliterated by a nettle forest. But the biggest shock was along the southern wall, where a few poppy tufts are now a giant hydra-headed hedge!
All-too easily and predicably I became obsessed with the poppies. You see, my Devon childhood was suffused with cornfields peppered with tiny poppies, too small and too quick to drop their bloodstained petals to pick. But this was a more adult experience.
These saturated scarlets were a Georgia O’Keefe painting run riot. The heavy, hairy buds hung in the air like so many scrotal sacs. But it was when the buds split that the real awakening happened. Like a monstrous butterfly silkily emerging from its pupa, they sensuously unfold until the black mascara’d centre, like a burlesque singer’s midnight make-up, stands surrounded by the reddest papery-est petals I have ever stood and stared at for, oh, hours on end.
If this all sounds too top-shelf, the cycle trips into town, with swooning crested ‘peewit’ lapwings, and the sound of the skylarks, the sight of the trembling hour-old foals, riding past the endemic lilac hedges, on through the heady banks of crimson rugosa that line the beach path was a much more wholesome experience.
But, enough, where were you when the sun shone?
