Nature

I pass the same old, scrawny timber regularly, but always with apprehension.

The tree, by elm standards no more than middle-aged, seems by its battered growth to be well advanced in senescence; old before its time; with veins blocked off by larval elm bark beetles and fungi unwittingly imported.

Ancient folklore assures us that the elm is a man-hater, with huge and heavy branches dropped with malice and without warning.

Does not the old saw read "Elm hateth man, and waiteth"? Who would dare to linger under such a tree?

Picture this under a grey sky below fast-moving, darker clouds scudding eastward, urged on by a stiff westerly; a wind barely felt at ground level, the air moist and warm, the leaves on neighbouring broad-leaves barely moving.

It was late afternoon, the tide well out.

Eager, cold-eyed gulls no longer patrolled the house-tops.

Most had gone to the shore, into the eye of the sea wind, following the ebb, hoping - surely as all such gulls must - to find manna (of any kind) left by the retreating salt water.

The local jackdaw mob - for that is what it seems to be - was restless, bursting into the air from taller trees only to resettle a few yards further on.

Their roost is among a straggling line of sycamores - some of them dead - skeletal, bark-less branches bare and bone-like.

Here, the handsome, intelligent 'daws' - of sleek ash-grey pates and strange, white-irised, eyes - will remain until first light.

Their one danger may be from a Little Owl nearby, that small but surprisingly savage bird of Pallas Athene.

Able to tackle and kill birds as big as the 'daws', it is a sly hunter, catching roosting birds unawares - half-asleep and unwary in the twiggy treetops.

So far, however, though always suspicious of this sly little killer (and at the same time an admirer of it) I have found no evidence.

In the garden, the few late-blooming dandelions are a challenge.

We pick each flower head the moment it appears, and thus prevent the spread of subsequent seed.

Each of the half-dozen decapitated today bore an insect, a single fly, all of them astonishingly reluctant to move away.

Most were a hover fly species, Syrphus ribesii, normally highly active, delightful, harmless insects bearing a yellow and black, wasp-like 'rugby jersey'.

These were the species whose larva is the ravening tiger of the aphid jungle; the gardener's friend, a ferocious and hungry 'maggot', individuals able to devour up to 50 greenflies a day.

The adult insects, abroad the whole summer and autumn through (if the weather were suitable) feed on nectar, or pollen.

Our garden flowers still in bloom are few in species and number; roses, marigolds, sweetpeas, tansy, gladioli and sturdy, prickle borage.

Most are welcome feeding platforms for a shrinking number of cooling, increasingly sluggish insects including two red admirals and a huge white-tailed queen bumblebee, desperately seeking winter quarters for the long hibernation, and carrying within her eggs bearing the promise of next spring.

I am reluctant to pull up the tall borage plants, the flowers still a wonderful blue; a beauty offset by leaves and stems bearing their hair coarse enough to prickle.

Borage, the delightful herb, the medieval Latin 'borrago', first came from the Middle East to thrive in English gardens centuries ago.

Our vernacular title arrived by torturous process and no doubt long word-corruptiuon from the Arabs; from a people who knew the rough, tough leaf and stem; folk who called it 'abu horas' - 'the Father of roughness'.

Another plant still blooming - tiny and far less obvious, truly wild even though both city and country dweller - is dependent on man's artefacts: his drystone walls.

This is Ivy-leaved toadflax; perhaps originally from Italy; thriving here for many a long year rooted in stone crack and joint.

The lipped flowers grow in full daylight; but seeds cases are held on long, snaking tendrils which grope a way into dark crevices, scattering the minute seeds on any soil formed there.