Bedstraws and Bee Orchids.

I am at my desk when a familiar, fresh and lovely scent – nostalgic almost – assails me. Petrichor! The smell of rain on dry, dusty ground, from the Greek petra for stone and ichor, the golden liquid that runs through the veins of the Immortals. The last, fat raindrops from the briefest of showers splashes onto my skin like bath water. Later, the car’s farm-dusted, hot-sky blue bonnet has become dappled, and, like the tall nettles in Edward Thomas’s poem of the same name, is the only thing ‘to prove the sweetness of a shower’.

In the stillness of the late afternoon’s stultifying heat, the kitchen tap sputters as the water runs out again. A great plume of dust curls up from the farm, as more haybales are carted in. We are all a bit jumpy. Mistaking it for a moment for smoke.

There are bee orchids on the hill and, just before sundown, I go looking for them. I triangulate a rough point along the down’s vast, heated, open expanse with the location I’ve been given: along the path then off it, towards the deep shade of the big hanging wood, 100m from the bottom. I walk carefully off the path, mindful of nests in the grassy tussocks. At intervals, meadow pipits flick out and skylarks rise up singing.

On the stressed, dry, tightly-grazed curves of these ‘bare’ chalk hills, plants have evolved to hug the thin layer of soil between springy turf skin and white chalk bone. A tall thistle or thorn tree becomes monumental; a landmark. Any rainwater that falls here is shed quickly from the dome-shaped hills, or percolates slowly through the limestone; little is retained, except in the old dewponds.

These hills are reputed to hold 90% of the remaining chalk grassland in Berkshire. The first effects of a new grazing rota are coming right and it’s exciting. This landscape is rainforest-rare and a square metre can hold 40 species of plant. Marbled white butterflies tumble over the dry grass tops. The hill glows gold with Lady’s bedstraw; brimstone-butter plumes of sunshine that perfume the down with the smell of new mown hay.

I sit on a fragrant ‘midsummer cushion’ of a meadow anthill, embroidered with wild thyme and the tiny mauve-white flowers of squinancywort, the ants far below. I hug my knees. The farmed countryside below is a combed, trimmed, parted, sprayed and set version of the wild, loose golden locks I sit among, the glow from it reflecting off my skin, like a buttercup held under the chin. I could make my bed here.

I pick a few torchlight sprays to take home. The posy in the kitchen keeps its warm, scented glow for days. I never did find the bee orchids.