Busy pollinators

July is the month when our wildflower meadows come fully into their own. Walk the margins of Common Field or pause at Rectory Green on a warm morning, and the air hums with purpose. Bumblebees work the clover and knapweed with an unhurried thoroughness, their amber-dusted bodies swaying from flower to flower. Smaller, sharper-featured solitary bees — mining bees, leafcutters — dart between stems in bursts of concentrated energy, each on its own errands, each a tiny engine of the summer.
 
Among the grasses, look too for the orchids that make these meadows so special. Common spotted orchids are at their peak in early July, their pink-purple spikes rising from leaves neatly blotched as if marked with a fine brush. The pyramidal orchid is more slender, its dense cone of flowers a deeper pink against the pale grass. And if you search carefully — and have a little luck — the bee orchid rewards a quiet eye: that extraordinary flower, with its velvet lip mimicking the body of a bee so precisely that it seems almost impossible that such a thing could arise by chance. It did, of course, though the full story of how and why still captivates botanists.

                                                 Some of our busiest pollinators

​The butterflies are everywhere now, and the meadow grasses are where to find them. Meadow Browns drift in low, lazy arcs, perfectly at home among the seed-heads. Marbled Whites — that most striking of our local species, patterned in bold black-and-white checks — are on the wing through July, favouring tall, flower-rich swards; look for them nectaring on knapweed and field scabious. Skippers, small and orange-golden, skip and settle with barely a pause. And the common blue, jewel-bright on a sunny afternoon, can be found wherever bird’s-foot trefoil grows in the turf.
 
Drop your gaze lower still, and there is more to see. Crickets rasp and chirp from deep in the grass stems — heard before they are seen, and often not seen at all. At your feet, lines of ants go about their business with a purposefulness that puts most of us to shame, threading between grass roots and bare earth on routes only they understand.
 
It is easy to walk past all of this. July asks you to slow down and notice what is happening all around.
 
Things to watch for this month: Bee orchids, which can appear in unexpected corners — uncut lawns, verges, as well as in the meadows. The first broods of common blue emerging on warm afternoons. And listen as well as look: the sustained, contented drone of a bumblebee working a flower is one of the most reassuring sounds of an English summer.