Thistle and brimstones: explosion in the fluff factory

Ouse Fen, Cambridgeshire It was as if someone had burst a thousand pillows along the bank

There are specks in the sky over every field and garden, silver-spoked seeds of thistledown, the snowflakes of summer. Up there in the blue, some float past to wherever, some bunch up unloved in the corner of a spider's web, and one has slipped indoors and rests weightless on my windowsill.

The other day, I went to a mass-production fluff factory, the thistle-lined dykes of Ouse Fen outside St Ives.