Out Of The Ashes

All images by Jo Sinclair

The bonfire I saw months ago smoking apocalyptically in winter fog has become a refuge for new life. The heatwave has turned the landscape hot and blonde and a hay meadow has been cut. Bales that were wasted in the mildewed damp of a washout summer were piled up last year and burnt. Now the scorched remains stand on fertile ash among a new pile of tree carcasses, prunings, pallets and bedsprings. Baby rabbits scatter in all directions from holes squeezed underneath.

I go closer. Butterflies rise up as if shaken from a blanket. Ragwort, thistles, nettles and borage, survivors of the mowers, form a ring around the bonfire. My legs are scratched and stung as I peer into this thriving place. Black and yellow striped caterpillars search the ragwort. They reach out with a rapid wriggle that looks like time-lapse photography, strangely probing the air for their next move. A cinnabar moth - the parent insect - is flying and I say wow out loud to no one at its crimson and charcoal wings. Too fast to photograph, it seems to disappear beneath the swirls of hay lying in flat rows beneath the sun rays.

Ringlet, meadow brown, small tortoiseshell and skipper butterflies swirl and linger briefly.

Dryad's saddle fungus, wedged into the amputated tree trunk at the heart of the heap, has pristine creamy flesh. A thick silken tunnel disappears beneath it. I forgot to give it a gentle tap to see what kind of spider prowled out (trying to identify it on Google Images I find a model without a head wearing a black spider-web transparent bra). Perhaps i-spot can help.