Passing Gifts
4 September 2025
Someone has left hammocks in the garden overnight.
Strung between thin branches of hazel and cotoneaster, they look like the remains of a secret fairy revel. Some are tilted at an angle, as if the occupant tumbled out drunk. Others are flecked with dust, abandoned long before sunrise. Sturdy and attached to their supports with several threads, these translucent sheets must be the work of a master craftsman …
Their makers are Common Hammock-weaver spiders (Linyphia triangularis). I imagine a colony of hatchlings spreading out across the garden in the moonlight, frantically spinning to get the job done before dawn. I search for them under and around the webs – at 5-6mm they should be easy to spot. Finding no sign of their mysterious ‘tuning-fork’ markings, I consider plucking at one of the webs to see if it resonates spider-sounds that make the weaver come running.
Common in the UK and a feature of late summer and early autumn, Linyphia triangularis is a sign the season is turning. Behind me, gentle chortling in the hedge reveals the blackbird is watching. Emerging from his hiding place, he flies to the old rowan and his strong toes grip with ease as he gobbles berries one by one. It is the first week of August. Apple trees are laden, raspberries are forming, and I have been filling a box of blackberries a day for weeks. When the blackbird departs, I see three rowan berries in his beak like a line of red peas – gifts for a late-season lover.
Far below the hammocks, Small China-mark moths (Cataclysta lemnata) dance silently over the pond. The weed has formed an aquatic forest grown tall in the drought. The moths navigate its treetops, weaving in and out, stopping to rest, then picking up flight again. The males are pale and small. The females larger, darker, with more markings – china marks, named after the markings on porcelain. Active all day and night since June (I have watched them), they feed and breed on the weed. Some have died there too, their tiny bodies like chips of crockery flecking the thick bristles.
A week later, when the grey sky hangs heavy and humid, I check the webs. Most of the originals are reduced to filmy shreds, the occupants either dead or moved on. A few new ones have appeared, and one is suspended like a thin cup in the whorl of a young rowan. Again, no sign of the maker. When the sun leaks out from behind the cloud, it is warm on my back. It brings out the scent of damsons grown too high to pick, rotting blackly, sweetening the air and exciting the flies. Above the pond, the moth-dance continues – they need all their eggs hidden in the weed before the light thins and the temperature drops.
Leaving the pond and walking back up to the house I glance into a hanging basket. An unknown moss appeared here a year ago, and I see now it has sprouted into something new; four tiny ferns in the dried green sludge. Their two-stage reproduction complete (moss-look-alike gametophyte first then fully-formed-fern sporophyte second) they will go from strength to strength in the short, damp days of autumn. When the China-mark moths are long gone and the Common Hammock-weavers have retreated into small, dark spaces, these ferns will thrive. Until the first frost blackens their fronds. Then they will shrink back into the earth, as if they had never even seen the sun.