SHE moved to the Ross-on-Wye neighbourhood as a child and its landscape had a profound effect on her for evermore. FLASHBACK recalls Margiad Evans - nature writer extraordinary.

THE wild bee was on the parlour ledge, squatting in a coma as though sunstricken. Caked on her legs were such immense loads of waxy pollen that she looked as if she were carrying panniers.

She was exhausted and looked sure to die for she could hardly drag herself along.

Having refreshed her with a flower into which she dug her black proboscis, the young woman fetched a delicate, sharp pair of curved nail scissors and sheared away the lumps as near to the legs as she dared.

''Then I put her on the outer sill where she began to crawl more briskly; and when I next looked she was gone,'' recounted the woman.

The bee-rescuer was Margiad Evans who had moved to Ross-on-Wye as a young child. It was once said that the magnificent landscape wound itself around her for the rest of her life and made her into a nature writer of astonishing quality.

It is now 25 years since one of her books ''Autobiography'' was published for the last time. It was written first as a journal when she was in her late 20s and early 30s and not originally intended for publication.

In the foreword of 'Autobiography', originally published in 1943 and then printed again in a revised form in 1974, PJ Kavanagh wrote: ''In the ordinary autobiographical sense it gives us hardly any information at all. But of what it was like to be Margiad Evans, to live inside her skin, it tells us as nearly as possible everything.''

There was the time the River Wye froze over and Margiad wrote: ''And I'm glad to be home, for the river is frozen and in all my life I have never seen the strange river in such fantasy. For years and years I have watched its curled current sweep past the bends and now that impetus is tied, is knotted and bound within itself.

Marvellous descriptions

''Often I go and stand by it to marvel at the wonder-whirls of the steadily strengthening ice. Once a blizzard swept down with a hissing and a burning cold, driving among the brown bushes. The thongs of the wind are tufted with snowflakes - they fell like a whip and a caress among the branches. And then the fine snow rose in drifts on the surface of the river and blew like a spirit expanding over the ice, and small birds flitted from the crested willows with weird cries.

''There are black holes where the gulls crowd and long black even stretches of water between the empty bleached banks, and the dull reflection of the sunset on the ice keeping pace with me as I walk. The sheeps' wool hangs in the barbed-wire all thickened with rime, and the flat dry reeds lie in a ditch rigid under a welding of frozen snow.''

And her descriptions of the people of the land are also to be marvelled at. Take, for example, the old man whom she meets one day. He is carrying wood.

She writes: ''He lifts his leg carefully over the hurdle and draws the other up with a groan of age. He is nearly 80, a thinker and watcher of outdoor life, one who unconsciously tames and influences wild animals, who believes in the intelligence of trees and plants and flowers.

''He wears cord breeches folded and thickly clouted under a leather belt, heavy socks and boots, knitted waistcoat and a hat like a green anthill. He is always dressed so except for the hat which becomes an old trilby when he goes shopping in Ross on a Thursday.

''His hair and moustache have gone yellow, not white, and he moves with a yard of good ground between each foot - none of your narrow town walks but acres in his gait as he goes pushing himself along with his thorn.''

We are told he lives at the bottom of a hill with his wife and grandson.

''The old man has a pet blackbird, not a cage bird, but a wild one who has attached itself to him and sleeps under his bed. His wife told how she heard something shuffling in the bedroom and took the cat up thinking it was rats, only to find her old man's creature comfortably roosting for the night.

''Most mornings he (the old man) is seen going across the field to a dead nettle patch. With his big dry hands he folds the brown stalks over into bundles and then strolls home to light the fire with them.

''The boy is thought to have a clever brain, and indeed his round green-yellow eyes are almost wild with intelligence. But if he lives to go to Oxford he will never take there such thinking power as is in his grandfather's touch, nor when he dies will such an understanding go out of the world.''

Magic in her words

Margiad loved working on the land. ''So I hoed alone and was happy alone. I like to tend what is going to be eaten, and I like to feel that I'm getting nourishment out of my food even before its ripe in the ground.''

And she enjoyed her garden: ''I have just been out in the garden and seen a moth sipping the night-scented stock. It interested me, so that I stood a long time watching it with my little watering jug in my hand. A parched scent of clover dust was in the air, like ash instead of dew, and the cries of the sheep came softly and thickly up from the meadows.

''The moth hovered at the centre of the flowers, its body quiveringly upheld between the whirling wings, drinking as if with rapture. It was a delicate gauzy creature.......and when it flew seemed almost to weave a nest of light.''

Margiad weaved magic with her words and a light went out when she died, not yet 50, in 1958.