Country diary: The impossible beauty of a flower meadow in summer | Mark Cocker

Hartington Meadows, Derbyshire: Kneel down for a close look, and you miss the panorama; take in the panorama, and you miss a world of detailThat the most orchid-rich meadows I've encountered in my life are located on an old quarry site are a reminder never to second-guess the final outcome of our industrial past. This may once have been a place of working men with pickaxes and horse carts loaded with limestone, but today it's a folded cloth of softest green, stitched with the white of ox-eye daisies and buttercup yellow.The orchids - common spotted with northern marsh, twayblade and bee orchids - add many thousands if not tens of thousands of touches of rose pink and dark magenta. Yet the individual colours are so threaded through the whole fabric that we noted how our sense of the orchids' presence was often lost. At any distance, the fields where we'd found all four species just looked green. Continue reading...