If you’re coming here for words of wisdom – and who could blame you if you are – I have a doozy for you today.

And that is that nature moves fast.

Now I’ll be the first to concede that this message has been subtly embedded in a lot of the stuff that passes for insight on these pages, but it’s time to look it square in the eye and ascertain the cut of its jib. Let’s proceed by way of examples, thus embracing an empirical approach. Just lounging on the veranda passing the time of day, I can see a good five or six.

Weeds: you may have noticed a certain preoccupation with weeds on here. In our garden, as with everyone’s, they grow, to invoke the mysterious colloquialism, like topsy. Or indeed, like weeds. Which is fast. They do offer diversity and in some cases produce attractive flowers, but man, they are all united by one quality: the speed of their propagation. With the recent deep soaking rains, they’ve responded with the gusto, needing no encouragement to get going with the growing.

We’ve raised our game in the war on weeds, what with the electric mower and its new cousin (they share a battery), the whippersnipper, weed-whacker, or strimmer, depending on your cultural heritage. This last week both were employed to the full extent of their wattage, resulting in a much neater-looking garden. Yet within a day, those pesky plants were sending up their little blossoms – the yellow, the pink, the teeny purple, irrepressible and, well – quick.

Butterflies. In fact, a metaphor for fleeting beauty. And boy can they fleet. Or flit. I am determined to record as many kinds photographically in as artistic a manner as possible within the confines of Corner Cottage’s rambling estate. There’s one I haven’t been able to identify, a species I see daily – not as prolifically as the cabbage whites or yellow admirals, but they’re about.

But can it be photographed? Well, above is the best I’ve managed so far. The reason? They’re fast. Not in a straight line, but in the way they jink like a rugby union international centre on the run. And they seldom, if ever settle. You think they might as you blunder about with camera raised, ready to put it to the eye and fire, but just when it looks like a split-second of stasis might happen – they jink. It’s hard not to take it personally.

Birds. All those little silvereyes, thornbills and gerygones seem to be gone. It’s not long since I photographed them collecting nesting material and documented their loquacious daily hunt for sustenance, but over the weeks their broods must have hatched and fledged and they’ve moved on. I’ve camped out every day under their favourite tree but they haven’t come by. Or perhaps it’s the bugs they found so delicious that have moved on: nothing stays still for long, does it?

Roses. I haven’t really gone on much about the many roses about the place but they’ve been a revelation this spring. Most have been here for much longer than we have, and they’re a mixture of old-fashioned and more modern, climbing and standard, predominantly white and some fabulous dusty pinks – with one vermilion climber over the water tank that’s truly stunning. They’ve budded, bloomed and started to blow out in just a week or so. Another literary symbol of how simultaneously refulgent and impermanent natural things can be.

Puppy. Our little prodigy has been sprouting like the weeds. In no time it all, it seems, his stubby legs have lengthened, he’s produced some fetching ginger eyebrows, and negotiating the front steps is the work of a confident bound rather than a series of wobbly face-plants. As with youth of all species, he’s in a hurry to be a big boy, no matter how much his humans lament the passing of the little butter bean that came to us not so long ago.

This all said and proven to the highest standards of academic rigour, I must concede that nature also moves exceeding slow. Trees take decades to reach maturity; stalagmites and stalactites accrete over centuries; hills and valleys rise and fall over millennia. But it’s unidirectional. It doesn’t change its mind. Once it’s on a course, it’s not an option to alter its direction – like Margaret Thatcher, it isn’t given to turning.

Now it would be tempting to draw all these musings together into a neat conclusion about climate change, which as we all know is proceeding inexorably, replacing those ancient, slow processes with faster, hotter, wilder forces. These cycles we know and rely on are shifting; it’ll take more than switching from petrol to electric lawnmowers to do anything about it. But you know all this and the fast and slow of a few spring weeks in Braidwood can’t teach you more.

OK, so I’m not really moved to find a lesson in every story, a moral in every tale. But observing the ways of the universe does tend to point out some details that are worth noting and wondering at: keeping your eyes and ears open seldom does you harm.