Wondrous free art, so close to home

ON sunny days — rare this summer — as we walk the lanes, bees are buzzing, flowers blooming, butterflies fluttering and birds carolling from the trees.

When we lean over the bridge, small trout skitter across the stream bed to hide under the bank or rush into the shelter of the water crowfoot, its long green tresses bedecked with white flowers. Driving home in the dusk, we see a fox cub on the road. Barely bigger than a marmalade cat, it is setting out into the world; bright-eyed and foxy, it is hard not to wish it well. At the pond, we see a clutch of fluffy ducklings rush after their mother, flapping their tiny wings, and then launching themselves into the water after her as she leaps from the bank. With composure they swim off after her in a perfect line.

Foxgloves nod over the country roads, especially where the ditches have been cut back, and felled woodland is a haze of pink with foxglove flowers which I always think look like thumb stalls, as worn by those with sore thumbs or sail-makers sewing canvases. Valerian sprouts from old walls and the pink corridors continue into the towns.