Wild Things....

Memory is an inexact science - I wouldn't want to rely on mine in time of national crisis. It lets me down in the supermarket and I'm too familiar with those 'top of the stair' moments when you find yourself asking: 'But why am I here?' - and one thing is for certain - it's not to discuss philosophy. Not bad in the pub quiz though. I can dredge up useless snippets from the glory-hole that is the bottom of my brain; Vietnamese currency? The Dong. Lord Kitchener's first names? Horatio Herbert. Dross really, but points win prizes.....

Anyway, what I started out to say was: I can't remember a year when the wild flowers have been so spectacular. Pillows of creamy primrose, then bluebells, creeping out from hedgerows - the last remnants of ancient woodland - waxen blue heads amongst virginial white stitchwort. Shy violets, this year quite brazen. Oxalis and the little barren strawberry. Then pushing through the roadside grasses come campions, red and white, and cow parsley with its fizzing frothing umbels of tiny white flowers. On our field another umbellifer, known to me only as 'Pig nut' is flowering. Its root is edible. My father told me that many years ago. He dug down beneath the plant with his pen knife and harvested the small nobbly root. It got a cursory wipe on his hankie and was given to me to taste. It was OK. Nutty.

The Hawthorn has flowered and now the hedges are draped in honeysuckle; orangeyellowpink and white and cream. Heavily scented. Heavenly. Wild roses too have unfolded simple papery petals, flowers held on thorny arching stems.

So many flowers this spring - and many yet to come. I can't remember one quite as colourful as this.