… From far off, in a wooded alley, it came into view: pleasant to behold, neat, radiant with a yellow hue that was uncommonly pure and even. I drew nearer: it was a long-neglected field, untilled and unsown, and now densely overgrown with low scrub. A pleasant scent blew off it suddenly, at once both bitter and floral. ‘Why, it’s bittercress,’ - I recalled some botanical atlas I’d read once - ‘it’s a kind of weed.’

A freshening breeze stole through the carpet of scrub; the whole field began to shimmer in golden waves that rolled up to the sunless walls of the wood. The dark-green and bright-yellow created an astonishing contrast, fleetingly akin to some precious chalice with a malachite rim.

A kite was soaring high in the sultry June sky. The heat presaged a thunderstorm; a huge storm cloud, swollen with rain, was already darkening the western horizon. It was only overhead that scrappy, rapidly-shifting cloud edges still sparkled blindingly with the unbearable light of molten silver. The wind was strengthening and the flowering bittercress was swaying to and fro, as if performing some exotic dance.

The ringing calls of unseen flocks of larks sounded ardent and unceasing. It seemed as if the flowers, the wood, and this remote field itself were all singing to the coming storm. And now these warm, grey little avian masses fell from somewhere in the sky and hung in the air above the bushes of golden bittercress. Some of the larks circled over the field itself, flitting from flower to flower and filling the surrounding air with a relentless sawing. Others, their wings quivering in frequent bursts, climbed straight up to hang four or five metres or so above the ground, where they joined in with the noisy hymn to life.

The clouds ahead of the storm stood towering, stretched across the whole sky; they were bluish-pink in places, as if burning up from within. I saw that only a small window of sky-blue was left above the wood, from which beams of earth-bound light burst through, tumbling down in a wide cascade, bathing the fragrant summer florescence in a warm, soft light. In the charged, electrified air, a soundless blizzard of circling aspen fluff was raging. And now, somewhere, thunder clapped deafeningly and the first fat drops of rain noisily lashed the golden flowering bittercress. At the moment the downpour arrived, it seemed at once that the whole of nature, in all its vitality, breathed deeply and sighed in relief; it seemed that all the trees, plants, birds and beasts were rejoicing in the glistening, rousing shower, woven from thick streams of water.

Soaked to the skin, straining to see, standing alone in the middle of the field which was now suddenly enveloped in quiet and pounded, as it were, by the elements, I was also silently relishing the intoxicating happiness of someone to whom is granted the chance once, perhaps twice a year at most, to see and to feel the amazing confusion of nature.