Tucked into the hedgerows, where the wild roses climb and curl, a strange thing grows in the warm early autumn sun.
It looks like a sea urchin woven from fairy floss – pink and green, frizzed and fine, like something a woodland sprite might use as a hairbrush. But this isn’t a fruit, or a flower. It’s a gall. And the rose didn’t mean to make it.
A tiny gall wasp, almost too small to see, slipped inside the rose’s leaf bud and laid her eggs. Alongside them she injected a cocktail of mysterious chemicals that science doens’t fully understand – a whispered instruction, like a form of gentle gaslighting. And the rose, confused but obliging, grew a structure it never intended and would never have created left to its own devices : a hollow chambered nursery, wrapped in delicate silken fibres.
Inside this living nest, the larvae sleep and feed in their little chambers, gorging on the plant matter. All summer long and into autumn they grow within the threads of their stolen home like minute squatters. Winter may come but the cold doesn’t touch them. Frost may cover the gall, but the little ones inside are warm and cosy.
Safe. Hidden. Unseen.
Come spring, they stir. Fully formed, they determinedly chew their way out through pinprick holes … and disappear into the hedgerow air. Away to mate, and to begin the cycle again.
What’s left behind is a relic with the ghost of a nursey once full – the gall remains long after its purpose is served. A dried husk with tiny exit holes. A quilt abandoned on the thorns.
Nature huh ? Both strange and beautiful.
Soft of Sight Photography 