AS OUTDOOR folk and country motorists will have noticed, the density of wild flowers this summer is exceptional.

“DO I dare to eat a peach?” J Alfred Prufrock, the sad anti-hero of TS Eliot’s eponymous love song asked himself in his old age. I recently dared to eat an Irish-grown peach in a Kinsale garden, and very fine and sweet it was, too, every bit as juicy as the peaches my brother grows in Spain.

AT this time of year, watching birds at the feeder is never more fascinating as parents troop out their offspring and teach them the location of a free lunch.

IN the comics we read as kids, nutty-looking English uncles with round glasses and straw hats followed by rosy-cheeked Enid Blyton or Famous Five children, all with butterfly nets, were figures of fun for us Irish boys.

Something terrible is happening to the waters around the coast of Ireland.

CLOUDS of butterflies and a haze of day-flying moths rose from beneath our feet as we walked the Seven Heads in west Cork on the glorious last day of May 2009.

My youngest son, currently teaching in Spain, had the good fortune to be invited to a lammergeyer-watching weekend in the Pyrenees.

WE’VE had bats around our house for years – pipistrelles, the smallest of Irish bats – and on these early summer nights we see them regularly.

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…” so sang Bob Dylan in the enigmatic verses of his lyric on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, an album released in May, 1963.

LATE April in Ireland and the woods are carpeted in bluebells, a sight to behold.