Country diary: I’m immersed in the rich, chromatic aura of a summer meadow | Summer

In his glorious poem Haymaking, about a flower meadow, Edward Thomas describes how the fiery day “had a kernel sweet of cold” and “the white empty road was lightly strewn/With leaves”. The heat here, however, was unrelieved, and if the road was empty, it was also liquefying at its margin. Sweat banded my cap and ran in the creases at the backs of my bare legs, where, I noticed, the horseflies focused their attentions.

Flower meadows, more than any other British land form, seem to be the most entangled and entangling places we have. They encircle and almost invade you with a sense of richness: not just the entwining hum of insect wings, nor the penetrating chromatic songs of the flowers themselves, but in an exuberant aura of living abundance.

I can convey it best by invoking a small tableau from my circuit at the site. It was a spot where two flowers – oxeye daisies and common knapweeds – mingled equally in a knee-high horizon of snowdrift white and dusky evening-pink. The blooms were at a ratio of hundreds per square metre and thousands per single photographic frame.

They recessed as a blended whole, but also as individual plants, radiating outwards, negotiating each other’s presence in a reticulation of stalks, stems, blooms or leaves so complex you could burst from any effort to comprehend it. It was magnificent, but almost overwhelming. The right response might not be to reckon with it, but to drop down before it.

There was one detail in Thomas’s Haymaking meadow that is also at this Derbyshire Wildlife Trust reserve. In unforgettable lines, speaking of the grasses and weeds, the men and their beasts in the heat, Thomas wrote “and all were silent. All was old.” So old, in fact, it seemed he was encountering not a living moment but something “immortal in a picture”. He is inaccurate in one specific sense. No image can be older than life, which has a lineage of 3.8bn years. Somehow, in a flower-rich meadow, you become aware that you and the flowers are party to it all.