Country diary: Thousands of honey drops on a single branch | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: In this garden we've had woolly aphids, rose aphids, whitefly and blackfly, now we have Californian maple aphids, who have a story of their ownAn accidental touch of a branch brings a handful of little sticky dots. Looking at the branch, the surprise is that all the lower ones are covered with a shifting pointillism of dots moving together. Under a hand lens they become autonomous animals - aphids.There are thousands of them, moving independently as individuals, each with a sense of purpose and moment, determined and working together. Forming clusters around scar tissue on bark wounds, walking upwards towards the canopy of opening leaves, the aphids catch the sunlight and their amber bodies shine with the viscosity of drops of honey. In the morning sun they cast shadows, an imaginary material to which old fears and prejudices stick. Continue reading...