Back on the track - what a difference a month makes

Well yesterday I meant to write about the path and start with a picture of it 5 weeks ago and a picture of it now and you could see how much it had changed. But as you see the answer is - really not much when you look in the distance. It's only when you get down and peer at the vegetation that you notice the difference. The yellow carpet of celandines has grown and flowered. The daffodils have come and almost gone. They're cultivated daffodils not like the Lent Lillies that you find in the woods around here. They were planted by Maurice who really loved the cut and cared for it for many years.

I'm no purist about these things and I love the huge blooms and strange double petals. Mostly I love them because of Maurice. Sadly gone now. But he lived all his life within a quarter of a mile of this cut and was a lovely man. He gave us a fig tree which might bear a lot of figs this year. (Two links come to my mind as I write one the quote "Each mark of things a-gone from view/ To eyesight's one to soulsight's two" it's by William Barnes who wrote Lynden Lea. http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/William_Barnes/5797
The other is about the fertilization of figs. It all depends on a special type of wasp a few milimetres long. The male is laid in the fig and lives there till it pupates at which point it must find a female (in the same fig). If there is one it then fertilizes the female (before she pupates) and dies. The female pupates (already mated) chews its way out of the fig picking up loads of polen en-route and flies to other figs to lay the eggs and polinate them and that's really only half the story - read more at: http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Ficus/index.html
Another even more peculiar life cycle is that of the liver fluke from sheep liver to sheep shit to waiting around in the water for years for a particular type of snail, back to hang around in the grass for a few more years and then be eaten by a sheep again. It makes our lives seem really mundane:

The rites of passage of the liver flukes
Don't feature in the list of World's Great Books.
Where human rites of passage - had you wondered -
Dominate ninety of the first one hundred.
And that is really odd - because you see
The flukes have eight or nine - where we have three.

Actually this is not strictly true, in "Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek" Annie Dillard has written one of the great books on just this sort of subject. Annie Dillard is one of my favourites but like many an author her best book is about her childhood. They say authors never have a life after about 15, they just spend their time writing books and not meeting anyone. For a few Dillard snippets try
http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint24.html

Anyway tomorrow celandines, and here is a picture of some in the cut.