I’M just in love with all these three, /The Weald and the Marsh and the Down countree./ Nor I don’t know which I love the most, /The Weald or the Marsh or the white Chalk coast!

Thus wrote Rudyard Kipling about the place he chose to live out his later life. His house Batemans was where East Sussex meets Kent — the Garden of England. 

Late each summer, but not too late, we head for this part of the world, not to just to enjoy memories of the man who is, for me at least, England’s greatest poet but with a much more prosaic purpose.

At the end of August, depending on the weather, we are here in search of Biggarreau Napoleons; Bradbourne Blacks; Crooked Billets; Danglers and even Nimble Dicks. We hope to find them on roadside stalls and small farm shops. They are just a few delicious varieties of English cherries.

Today 95 per cent of our cherries are imported, bland and uninteresting. The old English varieties on the other hand are subtle, sweet and dripping with red juice.

Not all these old cherries are red, Amber Heart and Merton Glory, if you can find them, are palest pink, almost white, but just as sweet and delicious with a flavour all their own.

Another treat to look out for are Morello cherries. These are sour and tart and perfect for … well tarts of course. 

A good cherry pie is hard to beat and some of the farms even sell these for us lazy foragers to take home.

The Romans brought the first cherry to Britain from Persia in the 1st century AD. Wild cherry trees grew up by old Roman roads from the stones spat out by the legions as they marched across the country.

Henry VIII had tasted cultivated cherries in Flanders and ordered that trees be planted at Teynsham in Kent. It was the start of a great British agricultural industry, an industry now sadly almost disappeared 

There is one major snag in the search for cherries. Wherever the punnets of fruit, running with juice, are put out for sale they are surrounded by a veritable cloud of wasps.

Now I have a bit of a confession to make. I don’t like wasps. I have written in these very pages in praise of the wasp’s close relative the honey bee and defended bees from the murderous outrage of neonicotinoid pesticides.

On the other hand I have never had a good word to say about wasps. Now a new survey has put me right. A group of wasp lovers and scientists from the University of Gloucester, University College London and the Royal Entomological Society are trying to make us all more aware of the good wasps do.

“Wasps are so much more important than you might think,” say these wasp-loving scientists. “Without wasps the world would be a far worse place.

“Wasps are voracious predators that control many plant pests like caterpillars and aphids. Without wasps many of the most common insect pests of crops and gardens would have very few natural predators. 

“Our many native wasps are also great pollinators: in fact, there is evidence that they do just as good a job as bees. A world without wasps would be a much worse place.” 

I’ll finish with my favourite wasp-related incident. I was at a course at the Field Study Council’s centre at Flatford Mill. 

We were sitting having afternoon tea on the lawn when another group of visitors arrived.

These were teenage students and they were buzzing with noisy excitement. One bold young man had captured something in his bug jar. When he proudly showed it round it was an amazing animal. Certainly I had never seen anything like it.

It was a very large queen European hornet (Vespa crabro). It looked just like a typical yellow and black striped wasp except this one was the size of a small mouse. It looked about two inches (50mm) long. It also looked very angry indeed.

One of the course instructors ordered that the hornet must be released unharmed, but not before explaining that this was probably a new queen setting out to establish a new colony. Hornets are eusocial which means they live in tightly organised social groups just like honey bees.

She also explained that the queen was very angry and that she was very likely to sting her captor — and because wasp stings, unlike bee stings, are not barbed, she could sting multiple times. Her venom would contain a huge amount of acetylcholine, a powerful and painful neurotransmitter.

The instructor was kind enough to add that it was unlikely that even a few stings, although agonising, would be fatal unless the young man was particularly allergic.

He took his jar to a far corner of the garden loosened the lid and the flipped it off as he ran away at a remarkable pace. He escaped a hornet sting but the unmerciful mocking from his classmates over the next few days was far worse, I’m sure, than any sharp injection of acetylcholine.

I’d like to bet that none of those teenagers will ever forget one lesson they learned at Flatford Mill. I was certainly pleased to have seen one of our rarest and most spectacular wild creatures of the British countryside.

In the last couple of years an even bigger wasp has been spotted in Gloucestershire and is spreading across Britain. It is the Asian Hornet (Vespa velutina) also known as the yellow-legged hornet. This highly aggressive predator of native insects is indigenous to south-east Asia. It is a real threat to our honeybees.

If you do see an Asian hornet, report it to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology on [email protected]. To find out much more about wasps and how to help with a national wasp survey visit www.bigwaspsurvey.org.