Thursday, August 13, 2009

Better weather

I think it was on Radio 5 yesterday that I heard of the 4 year old whose mummy had told him that grass was green because some elves once wanted a blanket so they stole some green from a rainbow & snuggled underneath it.

That strikes me as a perfect answer, at that age, though one hopes not all his questions are answered thus. His father said that he seemed satisfied at the time.

Anyway “because of the chlorophyll”, or whatever is judged to be scientifically correct, is not a complete answer – it just prompts a follow-up question such as Well why isn’t chlorophyll red?

The blue is certainly back in the chlorophyll this year. It was such a lovely sunny morning today, I left home in good time to have a good look round. The leaves are plentiful, but almost blue-grey, not yellow at all. No hint, in the morning light, of them beginning to turn.

There were a few butterflies hovering & flitting around the culvert – a lot of vegetation, including Himalayan balsam, is beginning to grow around the spot where the ground was churned up & the wall damaged when the giant sycamore fell down. We have not seen very many butterflies this year – too wet, I suppose.

I think that they were Cabbage Whites – there were only 3 or 4, but unusually large. And their wings too had a definite tinge of green