GLADIOLUS CALLIANTHUS

This beautiful flower has taken two years to come to bloom. I bought the corms in early 2012; it was being sold as the "Orchid lily" but it is actually the flower we used to call acidanthera ( I wonder how flowers feel about botanists constantly changing the plant's name: I doubt they care!). 2012, of course, was far too wet and chilly for the blooms to appear, although my pot was filled with promising sword-like leaves. I figured that was it, so I simply left them over winter in the pot, outside, and they had to put up with frost and snow and more rain, a bad winter. Then a late spring to add to their woes. But they started growing and now at last they are flowering. And the scent of them is overpowering. They are really quite gorgeous flowers and I'm so glad I didn't just turf them out, thinking they'd had it! But this winter I might treat them with the dignity they deserve and keep them drier....

WASPS, WHERE ARE THEY?

This wasps' nest was removed from my loft not so long ago. Its patterning is wonderful. And yet, despite the huge numbers of bumble bees around this year, there seem to be very  few wasps. Why?

There is plenty of falling ripe fruit for them- plums, apples, and pears have had generous crops this season. So where are the wasps? Did last year's constant rain affect their numbers ( I saw very few queens around in the early spring)?
There have also been fewer ladybirds in evidence. Is this what we can expect in the future, dearths or gluts of certain insects?  Red admiral butterflies are another insect missing from this autumn. Yet in a friends' field I have seen absolutely hundreds of those jewelled leaf beetles busy decimating dock leaves.(My friend was very pleased!)

Not that I am personally sorry there is an absence of wasps; I've been stung often enough to have great respect for them, respect best observed from a wide distance between myself and them. But they do a very good job of cleaning up, being fairly catholic in their food tastes.

Maybe next year they'll be present in vast numbers...

VOICES, and Seamus Heaney

Some voices are enough to make you salivate, others make you cringe. I had a friend years ago whose voice crisped and crimped me up inside as if I were a piece of overdone bacon leaping about in agony in the frying-pan, a voice that was too loud and that had the harshest sounds in its tone. But people come and go in our lives; I no longer hear this particular voice.
Among voices I find sheer luxurious pleasure to listen to are those of Tom Conteh, Eddie Mair.

And the late Seamus Heaney.
So much has already been said about him, his generosity of spirit, his modest manner, his great poetic genius. The only thing I can add to it is that I shall miss his voice. To hear him read, at a live performance, was an enormous joy. A recording is not quite the same, but thank goodness there are some.