Bird watching at Leighton Moss is the perfect way to spend  a hot day.  The coolness of bird-hides looking out onto Morecambe Bay, the susurration of the reed beds and the leafy shade of trees is delightful.
Long seed-capsules of greater willow-herb split to release  parachute seeds drifting away on the lightest  breeze.  Codlings and cream the flower is called- codlings, rosy-pink apples. 
Butterflies all about us as we walked.  Maybe  speckled wood, maybe not.

 The bliss of a gentle breeze as temperatures soar, again.  Wisps of alto-stratus against the blue. We'll swelter this afternoon, but we know our good fortune to be in Cumbria.
Weather maps show Atlantic fronts massing off- shore, but they melt away and come to nothing.  A brief shower of the finest rain.
In town, the River Kent has vile-looking clots of algae   and looks sick, its current sluggish.  It smells stale.
Meanwhile, United Utilities, will at last introduce a hose-pipe ban at the beginning of August.  When will they have  robust procedures in place, toward the conservation of water, toward protecting our environment ?

A glimpse of small skipper was enticing.  Two days later this golden butterfly  appeared  once more on the sunny slope where scabious grew thick. A brood had hatched and was on the wing. As sunlight broke through alto-cumulus cloud  butterflies spun a web around me, in courtship dance, in a feeding frenzy. This patch of scabious  must be a rich source of nectar,  a butterfly hot-spot. I am all involved in the butterfly experience so I settle into stillness and the magic all about me.  No need to seek further, here and now is everything.  I am silent, my shadow scarcely stirs, I am so still it's as if I am become invisible.
 

A meadow brown alights on a scabious, hoping for nectar. It's in for a shock. 
I took a sequence of photographs, unaware of the drama unfolding before me.  Only subsequently, in editing images, did I  begin to work it out.  So here's the sequence.
Stems of grass frame the butterfly.  Look closely at those seed-heads on the left.  In summer, long stems of grasses are woven into spiders' nests, and traps for the unwary.  Watch the position of the butterfly and see how it changes.

 Summer's heat-weave has burnished Scout Scar escarpment.  Hot limestone has  cooked the grasses.  The season powers through fast. 
Ten days ago, there were drifts of yellow hawkbit and dark green fritillaries fed on their nectar. Now the flowers are gone, leaving   parachute seed-heads  ready to catch the breeze.  Scabious are everywhere, with knapweed and carline thistle attracting bumble bees. There are days when butterflies luxuriate, sipping nectar in a leisurely way.

A juvenile dipper was food begging in the beck, its red gape wide.  It was not unexpected, the dipper is often seen at Elterwater.
The flora of heather moorland is perhaps my favourite and as we climbed up to the Lingmoor Ridge there were flowers I hoped to see.  Yellow stars of bog asphodel aplenty, although  they fade fast in the heat-wave. But where was the bog pimpernel, those tiny pale pink flowers found where water trickles off the fell and into the becks.  Where was the water?  We found none until we reached about 250 metres.

Flora followed water as we came off Lingmoor. Where water had been.  The bed of the beck was stone-dry but water had followed its channel and the yellow stars of bog asphodel grew thickly in every boggy hollow.  A blaze of bell heather in deep purple adorned the banks of the beck.  Ericas intermingled, cross-leaved heath, heather and bell heather resplendent.  Sundews grew angry red in pale sphagnum moss where the merest hint of water sustained them.  Distracted by a wealth of flowers, I  strayed from our descent line.

 Early July and the season of aquatic flora on the Lake District tarns.  Blea Tarn is surrounded by a boggy sump, with becks draining off Lingmoor and Side Pike, from the Wrynose Fells.  Seeking a shady spot for lunch, we sat on a bench looking north across the water whose surface was stippled with a mass of tiny flowers.  Was it water violet? Too far off to be sure, even through binoculars. I went down to the water's edge for a closer look and discovered a wealth of flowers in a spot I had previously overlooked. 

• Out in the open,  a searing sun and high humidity. I evaporate in a  shower of dripping and trickling sweat.  Bare  arms protest. Factor 50 isn’t enough.  Water weighs heavy  in our rucksacks but will  it last?   I'll shrivel up like  the sphagnum moss of the boggy sump about Skeggleswater.   Sphagnum moss made of water, now unmade.  
  

 Life follows water and flowers of bog asphodel and cross-leaved heath appear closer to the tarn. A rutted track is fringed with blood-red clots of sundew with tiny white flowers, sundew in dried-out sphagnum moss.

Carline thistle would not look our of place  in the desert. Their spiny outer casing  resembles the burnt-out vegetation I remember from an October visit to Crete after a  summer scorching.  The first week in July, the ground is parched and scorched from relentless heat and carline thistles open up, offering  nectar to bees.
A small tortoiseshell nectars on  thistle, all hot colours.
Dark red helleborine are at their most beautiful, amongst the limestone clitter and beside larch trees.  The air is fragrant with  resin and with herbal hints from the flora of limestone grassland.

Fritillaries shot through with sunlight are nectaring on scabious, on yellow hawkbit and hawkweed.  A dusky fluttering butterfly   alights on hot limestone clitter and turns to stone.  Drifts of flowers in stillness and heat.  Birds fall silent, the breeding season almost  accomplished.
The early morning lacked promise:  a blaze of sun in a monochrome  sky, the fells smothered in haze and  parched grasses crisp and crunching underfoot.  Flora burns out fast in the heat-wave that goes on and on. An interlude of butterflies was respite.