By mid-summer, the farm has its own quiet rush hour.
Stand by the elder hedgerow and the day rearranges itself around wings: a hoverfly holding steady over a single flower, bees zig-zagging from blossom to blossom, the soft flick of a bird landing three branches over. What looks like a tangle of green becomes something else entirely — a moving map of who’s feeding, who’s nesting, and who’s carrying the season on.
This is what we mean when we say *when the land is healthy, it hums*. The hum isn’t metaphor; it’s wings at work.
Edges that come back to life
On many farms, the edges are the places you pass by: fencelines, dam banks, the strip between paddock and track. Here at Widden Brook Farm, they’re some of the first places we look when we want to know how things are going.
When we planted the elder hedgerow as part of our permaculture food forest there were no small birds here at all. Now the hedge is its own small town — Superb Fairy-wrens, honeyeaters, willy wagtails and their young moving through a thicket of elder, aronia, lemon balm, lilli pilli and grasses. Insects arrive for the flowers and fruit; birds arrive for the insects. One layer invites the next.
Pollinators love edges like this. Flowers in dappled light, shelter close by, water not too far away — a corridor where they can feed and rest in safety before heading out again. Every time we walk along the hedge, we’re reminded that planting for ourselves is only half the story. The other half is what the hedge offers back to everyone else.
Pollination is a conversation
Pollination sounds like a textbook word, but on the ground it’s a conversation: between flower and insect, tree and bird, weather and the timing of the season.
Our variety of elderflower opens into creamy pink-and-white clusters that almost glow against the green. Look once and they’re just flowers; look again and you’ll see the constellations have started to move. A blue-banded bee wearing a dusting of pollen. A beetle you missed the first time. Tiny hoverflies tracing figure-eights in the air.
Each visit is a small act of trust. The plant offers nectar and pollen; the pollinator carries that pollen on. Little by little, the whole season tips from bloom into fruit set. Hazelnuts begin to form in their husks. Fruit trees quietly decide how heavy their branches will be. Elderberries swell along each stem.
We don’t manage that by force. Our part is to keep the conditions right: living soil beneath, mixed species in the pastures, hedges and shelterbelts that give cover and food right through the year. The rest is up to wings and weather.
From hedgerow to glass
Elderflower Mist Sparkling starts long before it sees the inside of a bottle.
Those same hedges that shelter wrens and hoverflies are where we gather blossoms on cool early-summer mornings. The air is still, the light soft, and the flowers at their most fragrant. We move slowly, taking only what we need from each umbel, leaving plenty behind for the insects and birds that depend on them.
Back at the shed, the blossoms meet mountain spring water, organic sugar, citrus and time. Wild yeasts begin their quiet work, turning sweetness into gentle sparkle. Months later, when the bottles have rested and the ferment has finished, that bloom corridor shows up again in the glass — not as a flavour you can name in a lab, but as a sense of brightness and lift.
There’s a thread running from pollinator to paddock to bottle: habitat → bloom → fruit set → craft → clarity. Every time we pour, we’re pouring that whole conversation.
Making room for the little workers
It’s easy to think of pollinators as “helpers” for our crops, but the truth is softer than that. We’re one guest among many.
The hedge is pantry, nursery and meeting place for countless small lives that never appear on a farm income statement. Dragonflies that patrol the dam at dusk. Microbats that flicker against the night sky. Native bees that nest in hollows and old posts. Their work keeps everything else going — balancing insect populations, carrying seed, stitching the food web together.
So when we plant or allow a paddock to recover, we ask a few simple questions:
- Does this give someone a place to feed?
- Does it give someone a place to hide?
- Does it keep the corridor unbroken between one patch of life and the next?
If the answer is yes more often than no, we know we’re heading in the right direction.
Summer shade, small glasses
January brings heat, crickets and long evenings — the kind of days where you want the table to feel generous but not heavy.
On the verandah, a bowl of prawns, lemon wedges and a handful of rocket feel like enough. Classic in the glass — bright elderflower, citrus and a gentle sparkle — keeps things light. It’s the kind of pairing we love here: simple food, a chilled bottle, conversation that has room to wander.
When the land is healthy, there’s a different kind of abundance at the table. Not excess, but ease. Pollinators working the hedges; birds calling from the treeline; a glass that keeps the ritual but goes lighter on the body.
Here’s to the small wings that make it all possible — and to summer evenings where you can taste their work in every sip.
