June – living up the mountain

June, and my world starts to gently turn brown. The bright spring flowers, a myriad of yellows, poppy red, vast swathes of pink bindweed across the slopes and the pinky purple of centaurea lining the roadsides, are drying and disappearing and their place is being taken by a whole panoply of brown. Seed heads, grasses, drying leaves. But when you look closely it’s a world of colours and tones and forms, but you have to look.

In the early morning and evening as the light shines low the grasses come to life. The road is lined with them, so many shapes and colours. Wild oats stand tall and proud, their pale creaminess glowing. There are tufts of fluffy grasses which I remember from my childhood, you pick the stem and sing the rhyme: Here’s a tree in summer, here’s a tree in winter ( pulling the seeds off and leaving the spindly stems) here’s a bunch of flowers and here are April showers ( throwing the seeds all around). Along the roadsides grow large clumps of Stapf, an ugly name for a beautiful grass, which when you look is a host of colours, multiple shades of soft browns with greens and in the evening light there is peach and pink with hints of gold.

And the flowers aren’t finished. This year there are rafts of wild alliums, tall spindly stems with deep crimson balls on top. What is lovely is that they’re all different sizes. You could miss them if you don’t look. Here and there there are clumps of deep purple valerian. They seem to favour small cliffs of earth next to the road. And above everything wave the heads of wild carrot or Queen Anne’s lace, delicate, beautiful, ephemeral.

Now is the time to wander in the evening and marvel, later it will all turn to a dull, lifeless brown as the summer becomes hotter but for now it’s a wonderland.

Over head there’s an opaque blue sky, almost the colour I painted my studio ceiling. Deep clear blue skies are for winter. Now they’re pastel blues with even a few clouds floating past. Up there are the eagles, calling and soaring. I hear their calls and look up. There are usually three. They soar overhead calling to each other and then they’re gone, flying into the sun or over the ridge and into the distance where my eyes can’t follow.

Wandering the road along the ridge I can see into two valleys. The winter rains brought so much water that the slopes were fluorescent in March and April, covered in the brightest of greens. Last summer’s devastating fire seemed far away, only if you looked closely could you make out the dark shapes of burnt trees and bushes. Last night I paused and looked across the hillsides, the blackened shapes of pines and almonds, olives and holm oaks are coming into contrast with the brown slopes. A memory, a stark warning of what the summer can bring.

I walk on, head for home, the familiar curves of the road. It’s almost dark and I have the road to myself. I look up to where some vines grow and in a rough patch I catch sight of a patch of alliums, their heads silhouetted against the darkening sky.

June, look closely and you’ll find the beauty.

NATURE NOTES