I didn’t see any dancing that day at Windmill Farm, but I was made more than welcome by one of the males. Watching out for adders in a likely spot, I heard a sharp and sudden rustle from behind me. It was not the loud, well spaced-out shuffle of leaves caused by a foraging bird, nor the soft but hurried movements of a small mammal, but a long continuous drawl, like a rope being dragged through the undergrowth, of a snake on the move. I turned around to be confronted not only by a male adder slithering deftly through dead fronds of bracken, but one that had chosen to ignore all the published literature on his species’ behaviour, and was rapidly slithering towards, rather than away from, me.
By the time he was about two feet directly in front of me, the continuous crackle of bracken beneath his underside hushed into silence. He sat near motionless in his perfect sun spot, the only movement being the slow, almost unperceivable flattening of his body across the ground like a deflating balloon, greedily gathering as much warmth as he could. He clearly had no idea I was there.
The thing that strikes you most when you find yourself so close to an adder is the eye. It’s intense, a fiery orange with a diamond-shaped pupil of deep black. Even though he wasn’t looking at me, that eye alone seemed to stare deep down into my psyche. Perhaps there was something of primal instinct in there, for it was the first time I felt slightly unnerved in the presence of the adder. It’s been supposed that our widespread fear of snakes is a genetic throwback to our ancestral past in Africa, when we would have to be on the look-out for genuinely dangerous characters like the black mamba. But this feeling is brief, and easily quashed by admiration for this beautiful member of our British wildlife. I felt honoured to have been in the adder’s presence as I moved back down the footpath.
We are lucky to have the adder, yet many people are either unaware or unnecessarily fearful of it. As a result, few get to marvel at what I feel is one of the greatest harbingers of spring. Just because adders aren’t celebrated by nineteenth-century poets, doesn’t mean they’re any less wonderful than a carpet of bluebells or the song of the skylark.
For me, spring is the return of the ace of snakes.
Peter Cooper, 2016
April
Apr. 5.
The frost injured the bloom of the wall-trees: covered the bloom with boughs of ivy.
Apr. 7.
Tortoise keeps still in its hole.
Apr. 10.
Planted two more beds of asparagus.
Apr. 15.
Cucumbers swell. Tortoise sleeps on. Radishes are drawn.
Apr. 17.
On this day Sir G. B. Rodney defeated the French fleet off Martinique.
Apr. 21.
The tortoise heaves up the earth, & puts out its head.
Apr. 22.
Tortoise comes-forth & walks around his coop: will not eat lettuce yet: goes to sleep at 4 o’clock p.m. In the hot weather last summer a flight of house-crickets were dispersed about the village: one got from the garden into my kitchen chimney, & continued there all the winter. There is now a considerable encrease & many young appear in the evening running about, & hunting for crumbs. From this circumstance it should seem that the impregnated females migrate. This is the case with ants.
Apr. 30.
A sprig of Antirrhinum cymbalaria, the ivy-leaved Toadsflax, which was planted last year on a shady water-table [ledge or projection at top of plinth] of the wall of my house, grew at a vast rate & extended itself full nine feet: & was in perpetual bloom ’til the hard frost came. In the severity of the winter it seemed to die: but it now revives again with vigor, & shows the rudiments of flowers. When in perfection it is a lovely plant. Lathraea sqammaria blows in the coppice below the church-litten near the foot-bridge over the stream.
Reverend Gilbert White, The Naturalist’s Journal, 1780
The appreciation of cherry blossom or sakura is a national ritual in Japan. In early spring the sakura zensen or cherry blossom front rolls north over the Japanese islands. Celebrations are planned: the Japanese enjoy sakuragari (cherry blossom hunting up in the mountains); yozakura (looking for cherry blossom after dark); hanamizake (drinking sake while viewing cherry blossom); hanami (picknicking and singing under cherry blossoms).
While these would mostly be impractical in a British spring, our cities are indebted to the cherries that scatter pink confetti over our gridlocked cars or froth gently like bubble bath at the foot of high-rise flats. Throughout the darkest months we also enjoy the calming presence of the winter flowering cherry tree Prunus subhirtella x autumnalis, a slender tree with a few quickly sketched boughs and simple pale white and pink blossom. In the shelter of city gardens it flowers quietly from November onwards, reaching a muted crescendo in early spring. But it is really too polite a tree for us.
Most of our favourite Japanese cherries are satozakura, or temple cherries, the product of hundreds of years of cultivation. They are typically low and spreading. In the earliest flowering cherries, the blossoms often appear on naked twigs, emphasising their transient beauty. Few of the trees have fruit: most are grafted. This is a pure, sexless aesthetic.
The basic form of a Japanese flowering cherry is a large ‘Y’, with one of the principal limbs slightly dominant: using this shape, the monks and gardeners of Japan bred trees that evoked wind and water and moons and mountains. In Japan they may be reverentially tended, ancient trees but their life on British streets is short and testing. The low, spreading cloud shape of a Shirofugen ends up like the head of a scrubbing brush; the weeping limbs of a Shegetsu resemble a drowned bathroom spider.
Too bad about the shape. All we Brits want is blossom, lots of blossom. We always want more for our money. More chocolate, more chips, more blossom. The Japanese are careful about the use of deep pink blossom – not too much of it among the white, preferably pale and restrained – but what do they know? We love deep, deep pink cherry blossoms on streets and in gardens, front lawns, hedgerows, terraces and pots. Even the terrifying bald guy down the road with the beer gut and braces and the bull terrier loves a pink cherry.
We love the clotted-pink, supplicating boughs of a Cheal’s weeping. Better yet, we love the Kanzan. In Japan the low-branching funnel shape of the Kanzan is a carefully employed flower vase, but to us it looks like a huge ice cream cone waiting to be filled with a strawberry Mr Whippy topped with jam. Its double pink flowers have as many as fifty petals: the superfluity is irresistible to our brains. The frilly flowers are like something optimistically purchased for the missus from Ann Summers. With age, the branches arch out and the Kanzan collapses into an ugly tangle but what do we care so long as it stays pink?
Kanzan is sometimes planted in roadside displays alternating with Ukon, a similar spreading ice cream cone of semi-double green-yellow flowers. The effect is a French nougat pattern of old Y-fronts and pink knickers; but perhaps the acidic harshness of the built world can only be neutralised by what is most naturally, profusely sweet and vulgar.
Cherries of all sorts have glossy grey and red bark with multiple bands round their trunks as if they had removed a score of wedding rings. Many Japanese cherries have identical boles because they are grafted onto stems of our native wild cherry or gean. In time the gean, its heart in our woodlands, becomes oppressed by its Japanese other half, who yearns for mountains and shrines. The gean grows cross and stout. The fractured Anglo-Japanese relationship shows as a swelling graft but even with this wound the marriage plods on for many years.
On its own, the gean sings the arrival of spring every bit as loud as the Japanese cherries. It is a native of our woods and it is planted commercially for timber. Not to be confused with the shrubby, sour-scented bird cherry, an old Gean can be a 90-foot, billowing spire of white blossom around Easter-time. Such a combination of size and delicacy is not plausible in the British spring. No, no: it is a mirage. The roving eye moves on, as if it had seen and dismissed the sight of an immense white elephant dancing on tiptoe among the naked branches of a distant wood. Must get
the eyes tested.
In the public park the gean shows a testy wildness, suckering and setting seeds from small red fruit. It refuses to be tidy; the symmetrical cone may decide to grow additional stems or lean drunkenly towards the light. The bark-skin peels and the split trunks of old trees look like burned, exploded sausages.
On a warm, clear April day a big gean will draw the eye upwards to survey its slender blossom-tipped branches that cross-hatch the blue sky like leading in a high stained-glass window. It may also give you a sore neck.
The gean likes space and is not good for streets but the 300-year-old cultivar ‘Plena’ – a smaller, spreading tree with pendulous double white flowers – is commonplace. It mixes easily with the Japanese cherries which are also mostly low and wide. (The exception being Amanagawa, an unmistakable pale-pink squashed spire.) The most spectacular of the Japanese whites is the Taihaku, or great white cherry which has huge blooms like big silk flowers. It was thought to have vanished altogether in the eighteenth century, but was rediscovered in 1923, growing in a Sussex garden.
Will Cohu, Out of the Woods: The Armchair Guide to Trees, 2007
Spring is all about change: it takes the monochrome canvas of the winter world and paints it into summer in spectacular fashion. Life flushes forth from the earth in an exhilarating show of strength, although the claws of winter can often be felt long after we thought it gone. This yearly renewal moves gradually across the country with tiny steps: the first primroses peek out from between the rocks, then the blackthorn blooms, then swallows swoop over the cliffs and the days slowly lengthen.
I once had the privilege of watching spring unfold before my eyes within the space of half a day; it was, quite simply, magical.
It was the first week of April; I had been volunteering for two weeks at the RSPB’s Haweswater reserve in Cumbria and was travelling back by train to my home in Sussex. The experience had been both educational and inspiring, working with wardens who spend all year on a wet, mountainous and unforgivingly wild reserve. In Cumbria a few signs of the coming spring had already appeared and the songs of the native birds got more energetic by the day. Already several of the very first migrant birds had arrived in the area as though out of a magician’s hat: pied flycatchers, swallows and wheatears made up the African lot – but they were joined by curlews that had travelled from the nearby coast to the uplands to breed. Yet despite these tentative harbingers of warmer weather, Haweswater still felt very much as though it were firmly in the clutches of Jack Frost. It rained a terrible, thick drizzle almost every day, the wind was like the breath of an ice dragon, frost encrusted the soggy ground each morning and the chill in the air seeped like a demon into my bones.
So despite having had a great experience on the reserve, I was glad to be going back to the relative warmth and dry of the south of England. The train followed a nearly exact north–south line to London from the pretty town of Penrith. When I left Cumbria the sky was its usual brooding grey self, hovering low over the mountains and stretching uninterrupted across the land until it met the north-west edge of the Yorkshire Dales. This first part of my journey showed few further signs of the arrival of spring, yet I still enjoyed the beautiful scenery of the Dales and Peak District as the train slid on its steady way past each craggy moor and smooth-sided valley.
As the train trundled slowly south into the gentle, rolling landscape of the Midlands the very air seemed to change: the sun peered through the scattering cloud and the grass quite literally looked greener; I could clearly see the hawthorns in every hedge putting forth their lime-green leaves. As we sped on through large towns and past tucked-away villages, the surrounding countryside became ever more verdant and full of life: bright flowers, mostly primroses, wild arum and dandelions, lined the verges of the roads and a few glowing marsh marigolds in the ditches were unmissable. Looking up, I spotted a couple of swallows skimming along with the urgency that all creatures have at this time of year. They were not the only birds, for when the train stopped for a few minutes at a signal post I saw herons, wrens, robins and a soaring buzzard all busily singing, feeding or displaying in one large field. I found it hard to believe that earlier that day I had been in the wet and cold and leafless Lake District – how could the spring I was now witnessing exist at the same time, in the same country, as winter?
By the time the train was just outside London some of the larger trees were in leaf too: oaks were only just bursting their buds, but elders had fully spread leaves, as did the occasional chestnut and sycamore. Over the few hundred miles I had covered on that one day the diverse signs of spring had accumulated one after the other, so that by the evening, when I reached home, spring was well and truly in charge. I had travelled through time: having started the journey in a landscape where winter was still taking its last gasps, I had ended it by fast-forwarding the year into beautiful spring. I had witnessed how the season of change sweeps northwards through our country, heralded by a few daring plants and animals in its vanguard.
Elliot Dowding, 2016
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
I
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And who wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!
II
And after April, when May follows,
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows –
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That ’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields are rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
Robert Browning, 1845
Among the meadows the buttercups in spring are as innumerable as ever and as pleasant to look upon. The petal of the buttercup has an enamel of gold; with the nail you may scrape it off, leaving still a yellow ground, but not reflecting the sunlight like the outer layer. From the centre the golden pollen covers the fingers with dust like that from the wing of a butterfly. In the branches of grass and by the gateways the germander speedwell looks like tiny specks of blue stolen, like Prometheus’ fire, from the summer sky. When the mowing-grass is ripe the heads of sorrel are so thick and close that at a little distance the surface seems as if sunset were always shining red upon it. From the spotted orchis leaves in April to the honeysuckle-clover in June, and the rose and the honeysuckle itself, the meadow has changed in nothing that delights the eye. The draining, indeed, has made it more comfortable to walk about on, and some of the rougher grasses have gone from the furrows, diminishing at the same time the number of cardamine flowers; but of these there are hundreds by the side of every tiny rivulet of water, and the aquatic grasses flourish in every ditch. The meadow-farmers, dairymen, have not grubbed many hedges – only a few, to enlarge the fields, too small before, by throwing two into one. So that hawthorn and blackthorn, ash and willow, with their varied hues of green in spring, briar and bramble, with blackberries and hips later on, are still there as in the old, old time. Bluebells, violets, cowslips – the same old favourite flowers – may be found on the mounds or sheltered nearby. The meadow-farmers have dealt mercifully with the hedges, because they know that for shade in heat and shelter in storm the cattle resort to them. The hedges – yes, the hedges, the very synonym of Merry England – are yet there, and long may they remain. Without hedges England would not be England. Hedges, thick and high, and full of flowers, birds, and livi
ng creatures, of shade and flecks of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees – I love their very thorns. You do not know how much there is in hedges.
We have still the woods, with here and there a forest, the beauty of the hills, and the charm of the winding brooks. I never see roads, or horses, men, or anything when I get beside a brook. There is the grass, and the wheat, the clouds, the delicious sky, and the wind, and the sunlight which falls on the heart like a song. It is the same, the very same, only I think it is brighter and more lovely now than it was twenty years ago.
Along the footpath we travel slowly; you cannot walk fast very long in a footpath; no matter how rapidly at first, you soon lessen your page, and country people always walk slowly. The stiles – how stupidly they are put together. For years and years every one who has passed them, as long as man can remember, has grumbled at them; yet there they are still, with the elms reaching high above, and cows gazing over – cows that look so powerful, but so peacefully yield the way. They are a better shape than the cattle of the ancient time, less lanky, and with fewer corners; the lines, to talk in yachtsman’s language, are finer. Roan is a colour that contrasts well with meadows and hedges. The horses are finer, both cart-horse and nag. Approaching the farmsteads, there are hay-ricks, but there are fewer corn-ricks. Instead of the rows on rows, like the conical huts of a savage town, there are but a few, sometimes none. So many are built in the fields and threshed there ‘to rights’, as the bailiff would say. It is not needful to have them near home or keep them, now the threshing-machine has stayed the flail and emptied the barns. Perhaps these are the only two losses to those who look at things and mete them with the eye – the corn-ricks and the barns. The corn-ricks were very characteristic, but even now you may see plenty if you look directly after the harvest. The barns are going by degrees, passing out of the life of farming; let us hope that some of them will be converted into silos, and so saved.
Spring Page 9