Country Mouse
On top of Brexit and gender uncertainty, we have anthropogenic climate change. But just as phenologists have reached a consensus that the four seasons will, from now on, arrive roughly two weeks earlier than they have done since records began, we find ourselves blessed with a proper, old-school winter.
Although today is mild and the thrushes are singing their hearts out in the coppice, a heavy, late-winter snowfall is forecast. This pleases me enormously, as the one beacon of constancy I ask for in this uncertain world is that daffodils will not flower earlier than March.
We are overdue for a correction, after years of them blooming around Pancake Day – or earlier. One absurd year, while I was staying at Wick, near Pershore, Worcestershire, there were even Yuletide daffodils in full bloom.
To the skeleton staff of cub reporters trying to fill the pages of local newspapers, they offered a godsend, double-page photo-spread opportunity. But for a doom-watcher like myself, they were only yet another example of global warning (sic).
For centuries, daffodils held their fire till March before opening. In Amaryllis at the Fair, Wiltshire nature writer Richard Jefferies, who lived only twenty miles from this cottage, on the wrong side of Marlborough, wrote, ‘There had been daffodils in that spot at least a century, opening every March to the dry winds that shrivel up the brown, dead leaves of winter, and carry them out from the bushes under the trees, sending them across the meadow – fleeing like a routed army before the bayonets of the East. Every spring, for a century at least, the daffodils had bloomed there.’
Of course the genius Jefferies would have been referring to the golden wild daffodil – as in Wordsworth’s ‘host’, rather than the hideous ‘improved’, stiff, undancing, garden-centre variety of today, whose clumps are intended to gladden the central reservations of innumerable dual carriageways.
No doubt the answer can be found somewhere in the definitive study of biographer Andrew Rossabi who has just published Volume One of his life of Jefferies, A Peculiarly English Genius, or a Wiltshire Taoist: The early years 1848-1867. After 799 pages, Jefferies is still in his teens. I intend to plough through it shortly.
In any case, will the cold persist, to allow this seasonal correction for the daffodils? I can get no reassurance from the professionals. Since the great storm of 1987 which Michael Fish famously underestimated, weathermen have covered their backs with two-pronged ambiguity.
First, they give the general picture – always ‘sunny spells with showers in places’. Then, just in case, they point to severe weather patterns, looming globally, which they describe in alarmist tones.
Borrowing the mood of Churchill’s darkest hour, they talk of weather ‘bombs’ and perfect storms. Recently, they ramped up the hysteria with the ‘Beast from the East’. And they warned us that the magnetic axis of the Earth might flip. That got us worried, but then there was no follow-up – or reassurance when it didn’t.
Last month, there was the phenomenon known as SSW (sudden stratospheric warming), which was causing the break-up of the polar vortex – a large area of cold air that normally hangs over the North Pole – to veer south over northern Europe and the US. This may or may not bring us the late-winter snowfall I crave, but it should keep the daffodils tightly sheathed, as nature intended.
Evidence suggests that traditional cold winters serve nature better than the flukey, modern, stop-start winters, which only confuse the birds and the bees. It’s all to do with synchronising blossom for insects, whose life cycles have evolved in concert with the vegetative world.
Beset by uncertainty, I made off to the local garden centre. Snowdrops are all very well but I need the rush of endorphins given by strong colour. There, the sky-high prices for exotic blooms incensed me and so, taking my custom elsewhere, I paused by a trade skip on the way out and rescued a perfectly healthy purple-flowering cyclamen from the Christmas range. It had been discarded in the shelf-clearing needed for the incoming tsunami of chocolate egg-related Easter chick grot; the potted bulbs in moss with hidden mini-eggs.
Bidding the jovial owner good day, I marched straight past him and placed my free plant carefully in the Volvo’s capacious rear. But he checked my progress, as I was shutting the boot, and asked why I hadn’t paid.
I explained that I felt sorry for the cyclamen being discarded in its prime while still fully functioning.
‘You need only have asked,’ said the nursery owner kindly.
It was a fair cop. When I got home and described the interchange to Mary, she upbraided me with a question: ‘But why do you have to alienate everyone locally?’
I tried to find the newspaper cutting I had read earlier which proposes that the Bill go through Parliament asking that plants be awarded sentient status. I was only saving the cyclamen from all-toofamiliar, human feelings of rejection. But as for the garden centre incident, it’s only the sort of aberrant behaviour you might expect from someone suffering, as I am (probably along with many readers), from a mild bout of seasonal affective disorder.
The Oldie