With Horticus
AN EARLY MORNING STROLL
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning at seven,
The hill rise’s dew pearled,
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn,
God’s in his heaven,
Alls’right with the world.
Robert Browning. Pippa passes.
Becoming somewhat bored with all the electioneering on the early morning news, I went for a walk along the footpath by Denton Brook, which an American friend calls ‘the trail by the creek’ and I was reminded of these words of Browning together with one of his other poems:
Oh,to be in England
Now that April’s here.
The early morning sun is filtering through the pale green leaves of the weeping willow and the fresh young foliage of the hawthorn and wild roses. and already there is a thin veil of bursting leaves over the trees and hedgerows. Nature has begun with her procession of wild flowers with a few cowslips and the grass is a tapestry of yellow celandines and dandelions with the odd graceful nodding flower of snake’s head fritillary peeping through. The sun is reflected from the shiny under surfaces of the rye grass and further along on a shady bank an early inflorescence of cow parsley is competing with clumps of bluebells and the golden spikes of the cultivated yellow dead nettle (Lamium galeobdolon0 standing proud of the silvery leaves. The Lamium is growing rampantly in an ideal situation providing ground cover on a damp shaded bank and preventing erosion.
And Lady-smocks all silvery white
And cuckoo buds of every hue
Do paint the meadows with delight. Loves Labours Lost
Several of our wild flowers have names which associate their flowering time with the bird which is the harbinger of spring. The cuckoo buds to which Shakespeare refers are buttercups and the lady -smocks (Cardamine pratensis), has other common names, such as cuckoo flower and milkmaids. Colonies of lady-smocks have established themselves along the brookside and they are in flower at the moment although there are insufficient to justify its name, because its whitish blossoms, when thickly scattered among the grass look like linen laid out to bleach.
Also flourishing in the damp conditions is the cuckoo-pint, which stands out among the surrounding vegetation with its dark green arrow shaped leaves. Soon it will produce the unusual flowers consisting of a large green and purple sheath enclosing a club-shaped column with a bright purple tip and many small florets clustered at the base. It has numerous common names, some of which are too bawdy to list here but even some of the more suitable ones are Victorian adaptations of ruder medieval forms. Examples are Lords and Ladies, Preacher-in-the-Pulpit, Adam and Eve and Wake Robin. When I was working in the rugged north, I used to notice the colonies on the banks of the dyke but I never put to the test the local claim that the pollen was slightly luminous and it was only later I heard the fen name, Fairy Lamps.
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