Where are the bees?

There's a lot of clover, and it should be full of footballers (bumble bees), shugies (drones) and redarses (redarsius), but nada. The odd bumbler in lavender beds* is all Zoltan and I ever see on our patrol. Nary a jasper even. If we can find the bees, maybe we'll find the sparrows as well. They've all gone somewhere or maybe they've turned invisible, or maybe the time of bees is over.

Ganache

* I think I know who you mean. Ed

Black gold in NW10

Cruiser Reports Drilling Success at Willesden Green

"The Willesden Green 06-35 well was drilled to approximately 2530 m depth. The well encountered two commercial zones which have been tested individually. The total of the last recorded rates for both zones is approximately 645 mcfd and 130 bpd of liquids or approximately 237 boepd gross (178 boepd net to the Company)."

So they packed up their bags and they moved to Beverly.
Hills that is. Swimming pools, movie stars...

It's only a matter of time before Ganache comes in from the courtyard of Herald House covered in black gunge, after dibbling into a gusher.

Business Desk

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• Willesden Eye Specialists private treatment
  "Your strabismus is our business"

Garden notes

There Now

Everything is better out of doors—drama, food, music, love.

You can hear the wind in the trees, moan of buzzflies, the smallness of voices in the distance, the similarity of gulls and schoolchildren's cries, desultory clink of hammer on tin far away, pecking of a neighbour's shovel on stone, angry jets.

The sheen of green-bellied flies does not go unnoticed, the visits and revisits of a rufus butterfly, and a wood pigeon's one bar blues.

On a hot day when any wind rushes through and cools your ankles, on a dry day when the trickle of water nearby is a joy to hear. Sirens do not distract the terrier from chewing a stick, working on it implacably, less concerned with noises off than with a hover fly that dares to interrupt.

Leaves lit through by the evening sun on top of a laurel mostly in shade, bring a memory from a lost summer, of a grand avenue with four rows of trees, and side roads with small terraced houses below.

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I particularly like this 12th century Irish planespotter's journal entry. It reminds me so much of my own thoughts when resting in the garden after hoeing around the beds. Ganache

Double bill at the Willesden Volta

If you liked Clouds of ink swirled from the pen of Heaven into the bowl of the sky. A pear tree bent in the rushing wind, I'm sorry to tell you the pear tree is no more. According to Mrs Haverty we were conned into having it felled after one of the two trunks split.

Anyway, the afternoon turned to blustery evening after a sunny day, and we still have some wind trees here, so Cinecitta Willesden presents a double bill today: Wind in the Elder / How Dogs get Worms. (QuickTime, 4.3 mb)

Coming Soon: Chancing my Arm (Trailer, PG). The ultimate horror flick, in which a demon battles with a disembodied arm for control of the Orb of Ten. One orb to fetch them all, one to return, one to throw again. (QuickTime, 10.5 mb)

* Script: Ganache. Steadicam: Onion Mbeke

Red roses for you

I massacred these wild roses last year, and they've returned sweeter than ever. My guilt is worse than Captain Vere's in Billy Budd. [Don't go all religious on us, for Pete's sake. Ed]



Ganache

Gardening roundup

Great excitement this evening with a silver and opalescent monsoon closing the recent heatwave. The naivest waves of cherry and apple blossom have long spent their weightless beauty and the once fearless lilacs have forgotten themselves and gone to seed. An embarrassment of popcorn white mayflowers quickly turned and fell, blushing pink speckles onto the grass.



Our camera crew rushed to capture the drama of a ladybird steeplejack patrolling the dawn white sprays of elderflower in the arboretum. The rampant and fecund elder has conjured these flowers from elaborate multi-candelabra podworks, and its show has only just begun.



The wild rose is everywhere tangled in the tall hedgerow of lilac, holly, forsythia, may and firethorn. And how could I omit forsythia, spring's first resplendent harbinger, from the chronology of inflorescence? Its yellow petals have been collected and made into languid catkins by the genteel laburnum, but-*

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Ganache

* I'm sorry to have to tell you that Ganache has been rushed to hospital with head injuries, after falling victim to a ten kilo soursop from the same tree in the greenhouse that nearly killed Prof. Kronk (causing him to forget the proof of his theorem, the law of the conservation of beauty). As much as we like it, I fear that either the soursop will have to be felled, or the bench relocated. Our best wishes for a speedy recovery go out to Ganache and his long time companion Velvan. Ed