A meadow in August is a splendid thing.
This one, at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, shivers with life - not just elegant grasses and sprightly wildflowers, but bees and indigo buntings and swallowtail butterflies that buzz and float along in summer's high heat.
A recent walk through this busy place a few miles south of New Hope took two hours and could've taken way more, as in all day and night, 24/7. A meadow, no kidding, is an entire universe to explore.
And the cicadas aren't background noise here, as they are in civilization. They're loud and proud - males, says our naturalist guide Nancy Putnam, sending out endless, urgent mating calls, bolstered by crickets, likely courting, too.
Who knew a meadow was so full of libido?
Or bees. Twenty species were identified in a study of the meadow five years ago, including the humble bumble bee, whose fuzzy behind we recognize right away.
Bumble bees, and their cousins, are everywhere - head first in the eight-foot cup plants and zigging and zagging through the mountain mint, a native plant they love and deer hate, and whose soft minty scent we inhale passing by.
The bees are drinking dew from the flower "cups" and collecting pollen from the mint, storing it in near-invisible sacs on the backs of their legs before heading home for lunch with the larvae.
Imagine. Every day, drivers barrel past the preserve on River Road, barely glancing at the five-acre meadow out front. It's just a blur of grass and flowers, on the way to somewhere else.
Originally, this was a sheep pasture, then a mowed lawn. The idea to convert it to a meadow first surfaced in 1997, around the time that day-to-day management at the preserve shifted from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to the nonprofit Bowman's Hill Wildlife Preserve Association.
With that change "came the chance to make some decisions on our own about how we'd like to present the property," says Paul Teese, the preserve's recently retired curator, who was executive director at the time.
"We're talking about what was right at the front entrance, and it seemed only logical that we should make a statement of what we're about and what people could come and see and enjoy at the preserve," he says.
The "statement" took a few years to plan, plant, and get established. And the turf was not removed; that would have encouraged bullyboy brambles and multiflora rose to move in.
