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