ONE MINUTE THERE; ONE MINUTE BACK - THREE MONTHS IN TWO MINUTES

We're going for a walk, down here under the dieing buddleia.
It's September 8^th and, wherever you look - blackberries. Ahead, you can see Portland Harbour (part of the English Channel) a sailing club and a castle built in the time of Henry VIII. Who would not want to walk here?

Rosebay Willow Herb is turning to seed. A new blackberry arch bends its way into the picture.

There are flowers still on the wild clematis and the blackberries behind assure you it's September, not June. (They were flowering then too.) In summer they are called 'Traveller's Joy'. 

Now nearly all have exploded like popcorn into massive seedheads and they've moved to their next name - 'Old Man's Beard'. Soon, these froths will deteriorate into horrible mounds of grey, science-fiction-like, Miss-Havisham's-room-like mess and it will cover the bushes as clingy as tarpaulins.

At the beginning of June, blackberry flowers looked like this. Pretty and delicate.

Now they are turned to fruit; lumpy and bumpy and not entirely pleasant up close - though wonderful to eat. Here's a group in all its stages; green, yellow, orange, red, black.  A store cupboard of extended ripening.

This was Viper's Bugloss and Fennel at the top of the path on 30th June. 

And now the Viper's Bugloss is like this:

- silver or grey, intricate or tatty, depending on your mood when you see it.  The seeds are small and tucked into tight cups which were, until very recently, upright and almost impossible to see inside. (I found them completely impossible to photograph!) Now we can just about make them out as little and dark but they still aren't sociable seeds, because there are tiny, hurting hairs to protect them.

One minute down. One minute up. Three months in two minutes.