The Lavender Bush

When I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer I was given early chemotherapy. I was told that sepsis was a very real risk during treatment and that there were certain things I must not do or eat to avoid it. 

One thing amongst that small list of dont’s was that I must not dig the garden due to microbes and bacteria in the soil. 

So one day, after my infusion and after Michelle had gone out, I set about digging the soil in the back garden and picking out roots with my bare hands. 

It was a triangular patch of ground in full sun which I had set aside for lavender plants.

I wanted to create a food source for all the bees and insects in the neighbourhood. 

There is surely no greater sign of the vitality and the industry of life than to watch bees, butterflies and other insects going about their daily business. 

I was concerned about the lack of bees and wanted to give the little fellows a helping hand. 

It half-killed me but after four hours of back breaking work I had prepared the ground, and a short while after that I had nipped out to the local garden centre and purchased 12 little lavender plants. 

Before Michelle returned home, I had managed to plant them in the area I had prepared. 

I didn’t manage to get the earth from under my fingernails, however, and received a short lecture on the pitfalls of not doing as the doctor ordered. 

Admittedly, the plants didn’t look like much yet but they were planted with their fully grown size in mind. 

Now they are fully grown and summers are full of the hum of bees: Honey bees, solitary bees, shaggy coated bees, bright orange and yellow bees; you name a species and they are all there; all come to put in a hard day’s graft on the lavender patch. 

I like to sit and watch them for hours at a time. I’m sure that the natural historian, David Attenborough could get a whole series about my lavender patch and he wouldn’t even need to keep flying all over the world to tell us that the planet is dying and that we shouldn’t keep flying all over the world. 

I think he’d probably have more success in his quest to save the world (and the BBC) by protecting land from overdevelopment and harmful pesticides. 

Habitat loss is probably the greatest threat to bees in the UK – and here in rural South Devon- so our policy of ripping out hedges for new housing on greenfield sites should be his main concern. 

Without bees and pollinators the world will struggle to feed itself. 

Bees and butterflies help pollinate approximately 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants and pollinate roughly 35 percent of the world’s food crops, including vegetables and fruit trees.

It seems daft then to ignore these hard workers and environmental activists in favour of South American sloths and an obsession with reducing carbon. 

If you think that changing to electric cars, driving everywhere at 20mph and restricting your freedom of movement to your 15 minute city or neighbourhood will change the climate, then you are sorely mistaken. Ugly great wind turbines won’t help either. 

I’ll soon be doing my own bit to reduce carbon dioxide by dying: something that will no doubt have our avuncular BBC naturalist, David, clapping his hands in glee. 

He is quoted as saying:

“Either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.”

So it turns out that WE are the carbon that he and ‘philanthropists’ like Bill Gates are seeking to reduce with “better access to healthcare”- by which they really mean access to abortion and euthanasia, man-made viruses and forever wars. 

David has a great job when you think about it. I have always loved the natural world and have built a good knowledge of the animals and insects with which we share these fleeting moments of life on earth. 

David has been able to travel, at taxpayers expense, to all continents and countries of the world to study the wonderful and diverse flora and fauna of our planet; a very rare privilege indeed. 

So I find it a little galling that he would rather you didn’t do these things but instead let him enjoy all those wonderful experiences and then tell you all about it: 

Like one of those complete bores who love to tell you all about their bloody holidays or their gap year in Nepal. 

In fact I can barely understand the man now that his teeth are three sizes too big for his mouth, yet still he continues to lecture us. 

Forgive my candour on this, but my tolerance for the bare faced hypocrisy that I’m being asked to swallow- and enjoy- has become a little too rich for my delicate constitution. 

When Adam first walked in the garden with God in the cool of the day, life was pretty peachy. 

But he soon cocked it all up by disobeying God and getting thrown out. The man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the serpent- but in reality they were just trying to make excuses. We like to excuse ourselves and blame others when we are wrong instead of just owning up to our mistakes.

Instead of merely enjoying that earthly paradise as the good Lord had made it, they wanted to play at being their own gods.

And isn’t that the sin of us all? The reason we know that other men cannot be trusted is that we cannot even trust ourselves to do the right thing.

And why do we always fall for it? Why are we so easily deceived? As with all big lies there must be a grain of truth in it. First, the lie appeals to our vanity and pride; then it must, of course, contain an element of truth that we may believe it.
Lastly, forbidden fruit is always a temptation to us.

Why then should David Attenborough or Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum get to decide who may or may not enjoy this earthly paradise? Who should stay and manage it and who should go? I certainly don’t remember voting for them. 

And if mankind were wiped from the face of the earth, who would be there to contemplate and appreciate it? 

And if we have done away with the need for God, by whose morality should we abide? Is it merely subjective and we can make up our own version of right and wrong; good and evil; or do away with those categories altogether? This kind of thinking has always ended badly. We know this from history.

And if there is no morality or meaning; if we are here by an accident of chemistry and the dust of exploded stars; the blind, unknowing, uncaring accident of our DNA, is there any reason to preserve it? Is reason itself a fallacy?

The answer, of course, is that without  a creator God, none of this is possible; not matter, nor morality; nor meaning. 

But with God ALL these things are possible. 

And so, despite the hypocrisy of men, the pride of my own heart and a desire to be the master of my own universe, I believe in God. 

I believe in life and in meaning and in our relationship with God and with one another. I believe in truth and above all things, love. 

The time has come again to prune back the lavender ready for next year. It has flowered for a few brief weeks and fed the bees and butterflies for miles around. 

There are about 270 species of bee in the Uk and their names often denote their behaviour and habitats. 

Honeybees will overwinter in a hive, huddled together to keep warm- as we will be once we’re all on smart meters as the planners wish so they can turn off your heating during peak periods. And it’s a fact that many more people die of cold than from heat. 

Solitary bees will die off as the temperature cools, but like responsible parents and good citizens they will leave their eggs with a stockpile of food supplies for when they hatch in the spring. They provide for the next generation. 

There are cuckoo bees, mining bees, leafcutter bees, Mason bees and Carpenter bees. 

Cuckoo bees live off the pollen gathered by other bees, just like Klaus and Dave. 

They even pinch the nests of other bees and kick out their young- like Bill. He’s already bought up 270,000 acres of farmland across 18 states and evicted generations of farmers in the process and is now making synthetic meat and lab-grown blueberries. For us to eat. I’m sure that nature already had that covered but who am I to question him?

In May of this year the EU granted the Netherlands 1.5 billion euros of their own money to bribe livestock farmers to give up their farms to reduce nitrogen. You won’t have seen the huge protests there or elsewhere because the mainstream media have also taken bribes to keep it quiet. 

So when your government starts behaving like a cuckoo bee and you’re shivering in your 15 minute hive-city and you can’t find anything to eat, I hope you’ll remember how it all came to this and wonder why you just let it happen. 

A final quote from our philanthropist friend Bill Gates:

“The world has 6.8 billion people; that’s headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.”

I’m not sure that I trust him with the future of our planet, do you? Perhaps it would be better to leave that part to God and just enjoy the garden.

Afterword:

There is much ancient folklore about bees and many stories invest bees with the ability to bridge the natural world and the afterlife. There is also a quaint custom of ‘telling the bees” when someone has died. 

I have it on good authority that after the death of Queen Elizabeth 2nd the Royal Beekeeper, John Chapple, informed the bees of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House of her passing. 

“You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you,’ he explained. 

I hope that someone will tell the bees when I am gone and look after my little lavender patch.