A WILDLY STUPID IDEA

I'm walking along. It's thundering. There are drips of rain. The light is bad. And I have a good idea.

At a stretch, the idea might not be considered a bad one but only later did I reflect that it is not always necessary to put a good idea into practice the very moment you think of it.

But I did.

Why not follow a bramble flower from bud to blackberry?

There are challenges.

The first is that I need to be able to identify the flower - to go back to it and know which it is.

The next is that it needs to be high enough that it doesn't get eaten the moment it ripens.

So it has to be easily found yet not easily reached.

I'm wandering along peering at the bushes. Would I remember this . . . or . . . that . . . if I returned?

Then I saw a bee.

Follow the flower from pollination to fruit.

I photograph the bee.

How will I identify the flower?

I find a branch that leads to it.

How will I identify the branch?

I tie a piece of grass round it.

I try to re-connect the branch to the flower the bee was on.

I fail.

I've spent ages brightening pictures I took in the gloom and peering into them. It hasn't worked. The flower I chose is not the same as the one the bee was on.

Never mind.

If the grass stays there I'll have roughly the right spot.

See the bit of grass out of focus at the front?
I might never find the right flower but as long as the grass stays there
there's a bit of a chance I'll find the branch.

The pictures will be fuzzy and lacking in the best kind of detail - I've chosen flowers my camera has to zoom to.

This may be the last you even hear of the bramble. On the other hand . . . I may be asking you for recipes in the autumn.

All pictures taken on the afternoon of July 19th 2014

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