The countryside in April
Sarah Ryan savours the smells, sights and sounds of the season as spring makes its presence felt
THE AIR IS thick with the pungent scent of the little white flowers at my feet: thousands of stars massed among long-bladed leaves. I crouch down and pluck one of the soft leaves from the ground. The heady, oniony scent intensifies with the rupture, and I drop it into a brown paper bag salvaged from a past shopping trip; crinkled and grubby, but still good enough to use.
These wild garlic plants, or ramsons, Allium ursinum, are forcing their fragrant heads up through the damp, crumbling leaf litter. I step carefully through the plants, picking healthy, young and clean-looking leaves and occasional flowers; some of which come up by the root: a tiny round onion of a bulb dangling from my hand and smeared with soil. Up to 20 flowers erupt at the tip of each stalk, with six narrow white petals and six powdery white stamen. I drop them in the bag until it is almost full, then roll it closed and put it in my pocket. Many more remain; crowding around and between the tree trunks. The cabbage days are ending; the slow preparations of spring are coming to sudden fruition, and the season is starting to live up to its name.
Kicking through last year’s leaves, I gaze up at the interlacing branches, blurred by the sun’s bright glare. Some are opening, tentatively, into leaf; others still tightly budded; determined to hold out until only the fullest days, richest in light, arrive.
Nature’s seat
Most plants, like the garlic, are not so fussy. On the edge of the wood, near the river, is a chunk of old tree: a relic from a past chopping, left as a bench for passers-by, a home for little beasties and a larder for anything that eats them. I perch on the edge, pausing to breathe in the cool freshness of the air, and listen to a bellowing wren, creaking Great tit and an occasional fluting ‘cuck-oo’. The chorus is rounder now than it has been in months.
The tree-bench has dried out with age and sunlight. I feel the coarse ridges of its bark beneath my fingers and the fine roughness of bare wood, where it has flaked away. Beside me, a bendy little plant has sprouted from the dark whorl of a knot. The feathery compound leaves are bottle green, edged with a thin line of scarlet; startling against the bleached, greying wood. There is no flower yet, but I
“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour” Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue’
wonder if it is a buttercup that has found a place in this old tree. Elsewhere on the log, paired leaves reach up from a fissure as though they are about to try to hoist themselves out and away. The leaves flop over the wood, basking in uncontested light.
New discoveries
The path along the river is busier now: there are people walking dogs that scamper around, snuffling at trees and posts, and snorting in the leaves, with their tails waving low.
The blackthorn between path and river is filled with tiny white blossoms, like scraps of tissue paper caught on the branches as a swift wind carried them through. An apple tree has thrown out white, pale pink and rich cherry-coloured blossoms, washed together like a scrap of red fabric caught among white sheets.
I stand up to walk home and, instead of taking the path along the river, I cut diagonally across the meadow, following the flattened route of a well-used track. Everywhere I look are signs that spring has arrived, all around me is tender and bright with young, new life.
“Well-apparel’d April on the heel Of limping Winter treads”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet