NEW FOREST: I sat in the French garden waiting for the taxi. Just below me, within the shelter of the grey stone balustrade, was a flowerbed ablaze with geraniums of translucent crimson. Suddenly the bed seemed full of movement. A moth, dark bodied, faintly marked with blue, and with rapidly, vibrating wings, was here and there and everywhere. In lovely curves it would chasser up to the glowing flowers and retire in unbroken movement, just coming near enough to sip the honey delicately on the wing. Someone was playing the piano in a neighbouring house. You would have said the moth was timing its movements to the rhythm of the tune. A dragonfly flashed across the flowers, and was gone. But the moth went to and fro perpetually at its giddy pace on its whirring pointed wings, a consummate ballerina.

From a plane tree came the notes of the chiffchaff, like the hawkmoth, ever on the move. Here at home the robins and wrens are full of song, and the goldfinches are singing in the apple tree. Yesterday, the 26th, the cutting of the fern was due to begin. It is green as yet, and still almost untouched by frost. But it will soon dry.

Guardian Country diary, 29 September 1926.