Wonderful evenings at Wakehurst Place

The sun is setting. It is orange-gold and so low, piercing the cloud. In the lower meadows, cut and now lush green, two full-grown foxes chase each other making darts and feints at each other in the dusk and from n a tree somewhere down the headgeline I hear the hiss-like rasp of an owl calling for food.

I sit on a warm wooden round seat with the words inscribed on it “No time to see...” except for once I have got time, and I am very lucky to see a white shape floating a little awkwardly over the long grass and the owl lands on a fence post, calling. It’s back to me it is the same colour of the August grass, and now it turns its face to me it is a white glow.  Then it bobs up across the grass and flies up into the dark safety of an oak to call again for food.

A tawny wails briefly, hoarsely almost from the wood. Out in front a kestrel slides across the skyline and into the trees and  mistle thrushes erupt, chattering angrily. Then again all is still, the air is cool, and soft, on every horizon I see the shape of a redwood. This meadow is flowered, seeding, quiet. And I muse on how to best describe the sound of the young owl: it is the bristles of a stiff yard brush on a rain-washed road; it is laboured wheezing; it is each puffing up of a balloon, the hunger growing; it is the slow monotony of the sharpening of a hunger for many mice; it is the spray of a paint can drawing a line from here to tomorrows’ night; it is the tree, breathing, heavy with summer; it is the sound of the rolling sea in the shore-side rocks: so many attempts and yet each feels like is falls so far short of the actual sound. Deep in the wood now I hear the foxes bark; it is dark and not yet 9 o’clock. The adult owl is hunting the field, ghostly: I watch it until I cannot see it’s pale shape any longer. The fox barks, the fox barks, and once more as I leave the silhouetted trees and the resin-rich night-black air.