Back at the beach house. We’re here to sow the poppy seed and surround ourselves in Danish summer. The sun rises before 4.30am and sets at 10pm. It’s never really dark. These are the long days of lazy bike rides by the sea.
The Icelandic horses have had a foal. Lazing now in the buttercup meadow, just its tail swishing at flies. The fields are scattered with wild orchids, shots of purple among the gold. Overhead, skylarks flutter and call. Peewits harass an egg-hunting rook.
Our meadow is alive with yellow: clumps of birdsfoot trefoil and buttercup. Henri, here a few days earlier than me, has given up on mowing the grass and been won round to its glories. She’s cut a couple of paths through to better take in the wilding flowers.
The garden is thick with ox-eye daisies, more commonly known here as Marguerite after the Danish queen who’s taken them as her motif. They punctuate the long grasses, like living in a kid’s colouring book.
Tall poppies are coming. They dot and line the green wheat fields on the road, skimmed by the sand martins who have returned to colonise the cliffs. We scatter the Serifos poppy seed among the edges and molehills – Henri is almost resigned to the moles, too.
There is a ‘bee-friendly’ bed strong on blues: with phacelia and cornflowers. The nasturtium are coming. I have over-sown one of the herb boxes with calendula, so I plant seedlings through some of the meadow.
We take a trip to the old plant nursery for a blackcurrant bush to supplement the two we have. Henri and her brother Jorn will add the harvest to our fruit found in Ina’s freezer. There’ll be the best jam.
We potter about. We eat outside and listen to the birds, sound-scan them on the Merlin app. We walk through the meadow in the morning, to the sea sunset at night.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
