I like spring. Well, I like autumn too, but spring has the flowers! First the white ones – snowdrops. Than the yellow ones – daffodils and primroses. Than the blue ones.
As a child, I remember ‘going bluebelling’. We did it every year, with my Gran. This was before the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 which, I thought, had made picking these flowers illegal. But, checking up on this, picking them is still OK, it’s just considered a bad idea – it takes away the pleasure for others, and doesn’t do a lot for the bees.
Well, we certainly did pick them. Armfuls of them. We had them all over the house, and I took large bunches to school where the teachers would fill vases with them. The colour was spectacular, that shade between purple and deep blue which characterises the proper English bluebell.
For many years, I wasn’t living anywhere near bluebell woods. But when I moved to Oxfordshire, the possibility of celebrating this stage of the year by going to such woods opened up again. We are surrounded by them, some – like Greys Court, where I took this photo, quite organised, others just doing their thing by the roadside. When my auntie was alive, we’d take her, and then when my mum was living nearby we’d take her. They both loved this way to mark the season, and to recall all those excursions over 50 years ago.
So at this time of year my Facebook feed is one bluebell shot after another. The intensity of colour: the power of the scent of bluebells as far as the eye can see. It’s a sensory paradise, and also s concentration of memories.
The retiring academic 