Rhododendrons

In sultry heat, I took a path that climbs relentlessly through Blacka Plantation to Blacka Moor and the Hathersage road. The light was as fabulous as the stunning green foliage and ferns all around me and I had just  heard a cuckoo, somewhere in the woods. Overhead, the sky was as blue as a robin's egg, up there above the canopy.

Though I was climbing at a sensible pace, as I reached the top of the gradient I admitted to myself that I needed a short rest to catch my breath.  There was a large smooth-topped rock in the middle of the path and it was wordlessly inviting me to sit there, so I did.

The cuckoo kept calling with its woodwind sound. Two notes over and over. To me the most reassuring sound of any English summer. Only the male calls "Cuck-oo!" as he declares his willingness to mate. The female has an entirely different call, a trilling sound that is less commonly identified than the plaintive male call.

And as I sat there on my rock, I thought I would never leave. A hover fly hung like a miniature drone in a shaft of sunlight. Two bumble bees flitted about, searching and inspecting tiny flowers as an American grey squirrel fearlessly descended a tree  that I could have reached out and touched but stayed stock still and watched the squirrel as he darted down the stony woodland path.

I felt at one with the scene as, like William Wordsworth perhaps,  I looked "upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude". It was only when I heard the impending approach of a mountain biker that my reverie was halted. I rose from my stone seat and proceeded.

In the top section of Blacka Plantation, the rhododendron bushes are currently blooming. How they ever got there, I have no idea.

The home of nearly all members of the rhododendron family is the Himalayan region in Asia. Until 1763 there were no rhododendrons on this large island here on the eastern perimeter of The Atlantic Ocean.

They were introduced by a certain botanist with the same sort of ignorance that saw cats and rats arriving in New Zealand, rabbits in Australia and European starlings in North America. Why couldn't they just leave well alone? Perhaps we know better now - but I am not so sure.

Rhododendrons are almost as invasive and undesirable as Japanese knotweed. In the nineteenth century they were planted on many country estates and gradually got away, invading moorland, riversides, coastal margins and woods.

Though I am never a fan of invasive species - flora or fauna, I reluctantly admit that rhododendron blooms can be very appealing as I hope my pictures from Blacka  Moor Plantation demonstrate.