a favourite walk in springtime

 One of the walks around Littlebury Green skirts the Audley End estate – with a blubell wood –

and banks of cowslips

– a snail feeds on a nettle –    

– and what a beautiful flower white deadnettle is when you look closely –  

– and dogs mercury is coming into flower with its  spiky inflorescences – 

John Clare noticed this early-flowering plant in ’Morning Pleasures’ –

Where mid the dark dog-mercury that abounds

Round each moss-stump, the woodlark hides her nest.

– and a stinging nettle in its full spring glory –

– country folklore recommends nettle juice combed through the hair  as a cure for both baldness and dandruff –and as a hairwash to improve the colour and glossiness of hair – and at this time of year nettles make wonderful soup (pick them with gloves on though!) –  

The wood is sweet, I love it well

In spending there my leisure hours

To look the snail its painted shell

And search about for curious flowers

John Clare

   

John Clare: 'a great love of nature's presence'

Storm clouds at evening over the fields under John Clare’s ‘circling sky’ – Glinton – two miles from where John Clare lived as a child and a young man - and where his beloved Mary Joyce lived – his childhood sweetheart and muse  – whose grave lies in the churchyard immortalised by him in his poem 'Glinton Spire' –

parts of the wood were carpeted with wood anemones

Clare was happiest in places untouched by human hand, where he was ‘left free in the rude rags of nature’ where ‘my wild eye in rapture adores every feature.’ 


Royce wood was full of birdsong as I stepped inside – carpeted with celandines lighting up the woodland floor – the first stitchwort of spring pure white stars in a scattering of bluebells – wood anemone thriving and living up to its name ‘windflower’ nodding under a breeze 

           


             'The wood is sweet, I love it well

In spending there my leisure hours

To look the snail its painted shell

And search about for curious flowers.

Or ‘neath the hazel’s leafy thatch

On a stulp or mossy ground

Little squirrels gambols watch

Oak trees dancing round and round…'

an early purple orchid 

violets nestling with celandines

ground ivy has a fabulous scent when you crush its leaves

The lovely pasque flower grows on the nature reserve at Barnack Hills and Holes, just as they did in Clare's day –

' ...I have found some in flower today which is very early but it is a very early spring ... & I could almost fancy that this blue anenonie sprang from the blood or dust of the romans for it haunts the roman bank of this neighbourhood & is found no were else  it grows on the roman bank agen swordy well & did grow in great plenty but the plough that destroyer of wild flowers has rooted it out of its long inherited dwelling  it grows also at the roman bank agen Burghley Park in Barnack Lordship...' 

– and wild cherry was in full blossom against the bright April sky – where Clare walking dreaming of ‘islands of Solitude’ – preferring nothing to wandering alone in the woods and fields, a book in his pocket – peering closely into wild flowers and watching birds and insects and climbing trees for birds’ nests –  writing of ‘the quiet love of nature’s presence’– 

  




– ‘we heard the bells chime but the fields was our church and we seemed to feel a religious feeling in our haunts’ – 

– clumps of forget-me-nots were growing at the edge of the path leading down to Bushy Wood where Clare often wandered botanising – it was there I found a lone oxslip, quite a rare find these days –

'For everything I felt a love

The weeds below, the birds above'

– and nightingales still sing on Bainton Heath near to Lolham bridges where Clare inscribed his name into the Barnack stone – just decipherable under a single-arch bridge spanning what used to be three low-lying open fields in Clare’s childhood – before the Enclosure Act arrived on his patch and denied him the right to roam any more – we arrived as dusk was falling on a cold April evening but undeterred by the damp chill they poured out their song into the gathering darkness – 'we now may be assured that the summer is nigh at hand'  wrote Clare – and composed one of his greatest poems inspired by his long hours observing nightingales in their habitat, 'The Nightingale's Nest '.    

John Clare was our greatest nature poet, a complete original with ‘a relish for eternity’. He describes


 ' ....my origin as love divine

An essence to be crushed but never die

That like a light hereafter shall arise.'

spring at madingley hall

 

birch catkins in afternoon sunshine 

   – violets nestling among primroses in the meadow, and a snowflake in the walled garden

wood anemone

anchusa

– and spring has arrived, with periwinkle growing against a stone wall next to white comfrey, both plants rich in folklore which have been potent remedies in herbal medicine over the centuries –




and a false oxslip, a lovely primrose/cowslip hybrid in the long grass

Our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence … We have become rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom.Carl Jung, On Ultimate Things

the primrose, the cowslip and the oxslip

The meadow in front of Madingley Hall near Cambridge was sprinkled with cowslips and primroses this weekend, basking in April sunshine.

But they have been promiscuous…


Primrose (Primula vulgaris), left

Cowslip (Primula veris), below

….. and this is their offspring: a beautiful hybrid which is actually not uncommon, and for obvious reasons known as false oxlip.




But this is what the true oxslip looks like, photographed in Shadwell Wood last spring.
Oxslip (Primula elatior) right, and below

Endless forms most beautiful….

Charles Darwin

the first spring flowers

The first celandines I've seen this year, pictured at Playford in Suffolk at the beginning of March. Its local names include golden guineas, golden stars, and starflower. Wordsworth knew it as a barometer:



There is a flower, the lesser celandine
That shrinks, like  many more, from cold and rain,
And, the first moment that the sun doth shine,
Bright as the sun himself, tis out again.

And a single daisy,  one of John Clare's favourite flowers:

The daisy is a happy flower,

And comes at early spring,

And brings with it the sunny hour

When bees are on the wing….

He loved the violet, too, calling it a 'lone dweller in the pathless shade', coming into flower when 'watery skies are full/ Of streaming dappled clouds so pale.'

The 6th century poet Fortunatus, when he sent violets to St Rhadegund, wrote ‘Of all the fragrant herbs, none I send can compare with the nobleness of the purple violets; they shine in royal purple, and perfume and beauty unite in their petals. May you show forth in your life the peace they represent.’

Suppose a river or a drop of water, an apple or a sand, an ear of corn, or an herb: God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we. He seeth how it relateth to angels and men….
Thomas Traherne

a reservoir

Here is where I escape to sit, and find solitude, stillness, and often silence. A pair of herons circle low, a moorhen squawks from the reeds. Pike patrol these waters, and a family of reed warblers return each April to nest in the phragmites. In summer, the pond is carpeted with waterlilies, and the surrounding bank is tunnelled by badgers.


I came here on a clear day of warm sunshine in mid-March when the trees were full of chaffinches chortling, great tits calling and a wren singing. A pheasant croaked from the fields beyond. The weeping willow was cloaked in a film of gold, a young ash tree stark against the evening sky.

Not in the midst of life's tumult nor in the world of pleasure's round does God show himself, but in the inspiration of nature: grace, light as a breath of fresh air in a still small voice.
Saint Jerome

hares in the snow

Deep snow shrouded the village overnight, white and silent, covering the fields – where several hares were running through the cold morning







– the snowfall striped branches of a beech tree – a hungry kestrel perched alone on a treetop, frost-puffed, waiting for lunch – the path across the top of the hill was deserted –

– frosted ivy berries shivered in the cold –  in the garden the bird feeders were busy all day long with blackbirds, the resident robin, longtailed tits, blue and great tits, sparrrows – and a goldfinch

– the corner of the garden under the yew tree was smothered in white, even as never before in the place of deepest shade – and the east wind had drifted a bank of snow against the front door….

In his In the Country,  Edward Thomas writes of the ‘majestic quiet, of the destiny which binds us to infinity and eternity