Summer

For the first time in many years summer has seemed to me to be as long as winter – and how long a Derbyshire winter can seem. We’ve had glorious days of light and sunshine, with intermittent wild bursts of rain, from the first greening of the hawthorn, to our recent weeks of the scented Buddleia flowers and clouds of Peacock and Tortoiseshell butterflies. Now the swifts have flown, too soon, and the apples and mirabelles are ripening and falling, but still the bats flutter out every night, and it feels we may have a few weeks left before the tug and bite of autumn.

As a reminder of deep summer, this is a short film of the orchard in July, created by George Peck, who took the wonderful photographs of the frogs earlier this year. Sunset in the Orchard.