Light enough to sweeten tea without changing its flavour. Lovely enough to eat straight from the spoon when no one's looking. This is a honey that rewards patience — the flavours are there, but they're gentle, and they reveal themselves gradually rather than announcing themselves. One of the most quietly extraordinary things we've ever found.
236 jars from a wildflower meadow in Sussex. June. From bees that are, by any measure, among the luckiest in the country.
John and Gayle's bees live in a wildlife haven: wildflower meadows sheltered by trees, overlooking fishing lakes that John created from farmland in the 1980s. Gayle's life work has been the meadows — planted and tended specifically to support pollinators, now home to an extraordinary range of plants, insects and animals.
Beekeeping came to John and Gayle via Gayle's legendary persistence — she gave John a beekeeping book every Christmas until he relented. Several years on, I love my visits: the landscape is as beautiful as it sounds, and catching up with them is always one of the highlights of my year.