Wild winds of change

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/18/wild-winds-change

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The wind is warm but wild, speeding the low-lying piles of fluffy white cloud across the sky while leaving those higher above relatively unmoving. Patches of blue appear in the newly formed cloud gaps only to disappear almost immediately, causing the landscape one minute to be bathed in sunshine, the next clothed in shadow.

It’s impossible to form one overall impression of the day, only a succession of fleeting images the intensity of whose colours constantly alters in response to the changing light. And any attempt to record them except in the human memory proves futile.

By the time the camera is whisked out of the bag that protects it from wind-borne sand, things have changed once more; the shifting sun has raced across the bay to the far headland and the following shade which has already engulfed us is in hot pursuit.

Time after time I just miss the shot I am looking for, the brightly lit carpet of the late summer flowers, white and yellow and purple against the aquamarines and indigos of the sea.

Brightest of all the flowers is the hawkbit, its yellow blooms bowing and dancing in the stiff breeze. Closer to the ground are the last few spikes of the lady’s bedstraw whose heady perfume had filled the air just a few weeks ago.

Scattered throughout the grass are heads of red clover, umbels of wild carrot and masses of eyebright, some of whose tiny white petals also bear a patch of yellow or purple. But though these three are the dominant colours they are not the only ones I hope to capture in my photo. For, growing abundantly among them, forming unexpected swaths of warm blues different both from that of the sky above and the sea beyond, are expanses of harebells.

The fully opened flowers atop the slender stems are both rich with colour and almost translucent in their delicacy, yet the plant’s apparent fragility belies its resilient nature. Unlikely as it seems, this exposed site, so windswept and so close to the sea, is one of the harebell’s preferred habitats.

• Forty Years on the Welsh Bird Islands, the 2015 memorial lecture in honour of the late Country diarist William Condry, will be given in Machynlleth on 3 October by Professor Tim Birkhead