A summer of rain, roses and nightingales

Days of rain and wild roses, a very British June. After the breathless spell of hot weather and sunshine, the showers were inevitable. Although some have been gently summery – good growing weather, as gardeners say – many have been epic downpours, looming like fantastical cities of cloud, bursting into tempests, thunder and lightning, cats and dogs, stair-rods, flash floods.

Sometimes the whole Wagnerian spectacle comes and goes in minutes, fascinatingly local when a mile or two down the road remains bone dry. The weather feels personal, purging, and inside the storms is another, existential world. Or that’s how it felt, broken down on the motorway. Mercifully, we were in a service station car park, and once the vehicle was fixed enough to get us home, we churned through the carwash of motorway spray back to Wenlock.

We had been on our way to Kent to experience nightingales, perhaps the most romantic of wild phenomena that has found a home in our culture, however tenuously it hangs on to its home in our land. But although temporarily thwarted, it occurred to me, staring into the green, watery British June, that there was another, similarly romantic, phenomenon all around us. In secret corners of corporate landscaping, on motorway embankments, in countryside hedges, gardens and unvisited patches of scrub, the wild roses are flowering.

Despite the commonness of dog roses, they exert a special charm that is hardly rivalled by their garden relatives. There is something about the wildness of the dog rose, the way it stands outside cultivation with a beauty that inspires so much imitation, a wildness as individual as these showers.

From the deepest sensual pink to the palest moonlight, the dog roses are too genetically complex to narrowly define as a distinct species, too common to be rare or exotic, yet they offer a poetry as romantic as nightingales, and both transcend cultural and national boundaries. I’m heading southeast down the road again, and more weather is forecast, but it’s all part of summer: journeys, rain, roses, even nightingales?

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