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Five Years of Flowers

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I have not felt up to much creativity of late, having lost my mother earlier this year. I have, though, found the completion of various pre-existing projects quite therapeutic, such as this video which I began making late last year and finished today. It is a celebration of five years' worth of flowers, photographed around the Calder Valley and elsewhere in the North of England, and I have dedicated it to my mum, who was a life-long lover of plants and nature, and played a big role in encouraging my own love of gardening and flowers.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-rjv-B91Ng
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Invertebrate Summer

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Owing to the imminence of a forthcoming poetry publication on the theme, invertebrates have been on my mind. On a canalside walk with friends, we noted that this year there seemed to have been more insects than ever around these parts. Perhaps it’s a combination of thriving trees and plants planted in recent years, and the recent hot weather – which increases insect mating - but I have noticed a boon of little creatures on the leaves and branches flanking the canal, weaving in and out of riverside flowers, and turning up unexpectedly on roadsides, in fields and woods. Naturally, there is no shortage of seasonal regulars – wasps seem to outnumber bees, though the hollyhocks on my road are a favourite haunt of honeybees, which gorge on pollen and emerge smothered in white, like dusted jellybabies. Roadisde roses and thistles by the Calder throng with bees, wasps and ants. White and peacock butterflies bob about the flowers at Copley reserve, where I watched a cinnamon moth caterpilla
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  This was my final column of 2021 for the Halifax Courier, part of my "Wildlife Watch" series which appears in the paper roughly every fortnight. I'm looking from my window onto the Rochdale Canal, watching a mallard float amid the ripples. It reminds me how these columns began with my walks from here in Sowerby Bridge along that same canal, taking in the birds, buds, and the coming of spring. The clouds and puddles this December morning are a far cry from the the warm colours of those April days. Paths are streaked in residue of rain, car bonnets veneered in frost. The canal, whose sun-sparkled surface glittered below flowering trees, shivers now, beneath skeletal branches and doomy skies. But recent snows, together with festive birds and berries, remind us that winter heralds beauties of its own. Every day I watch goosanders dot the cold canal, males with heads of polished green, females eagle-eyed with snow-white breasts and ginger tufts. Though year-round residents,
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