WHAT TO SPOT
Natural wonders to watch out for this week…
The seasons keep flip-flopping between winter and spring. No sooner does a bright day of sunshine inspire a glimmer of hope than the temperature plunges again and the flowers droop their heads.
Even now in my part of the world, in south Yorkshire, the trees are still to be fully in leaf. The blackthorn blossom, normally the first of the year to emerge and long overtaken by other species by early May, clings stubbornly to the hedgerows like the last flecks of melting snow.
The past month, the weather forecasters say, has been the frostiest April for 60 years. Over the course of the month, across England alone there has been nearly a full fortnight’s worth or air frosts: you see it traced out along the still bare branches and sealed buds where the rimy mornings have kept spring at bay.
But even during cold years such as this, one flower stubbornly refuses to be cowed. In fact, the forget-me-nots in my garden have rarely looked as glorious as they do this year. My lawn is studded with blue.
The forget-me-not thrives in areas where human hands have toiled. The Latin name of the field forget-me-not, arvensis, means “of, or growing in, cultivated land”. Consider it as a companion plant, one whose small seed pods easily attach to humans and livestock as they pass and spread with joyful abandon.
In folklore the forget-me-not stands for true love and memory, and I like the idea of the following year’s sprays mapping out where we have snipped, stepped and scythed. That makes the flower a weed to some, and one to be purged atall costs, but I prefer writer Richard Mabey’s description of such species as “outlaw plants”.
For far from being an unwanted intruder, the forgetme-not is actually my favourite flower.
There is something about the cornflower blue of its petals and golden pistil that conjures up some inner warmth. The flowers may appear a little chintzy to some tastes, I suppose, but chintz is all the rage at the moment – just look at the recent expensive refurb of the Prime Minister’s Downing Street flat.
That is not to say the forgetme-not is a flower of expensive tastes. It will happily sprout just about anywhere. As well as my lawn, it has popped up at the edge of the pond, and one has rooted itself in the cracked concrete of my front drive.
As attested by the way they have flourished during this freezing spring, they are tough little flowers. In previous centuries, forget-me-nots were nicknamed “scorpion grass” for their coiled stems, which can easily withstand a late spring frost, while the flowers can continue right through into the summer and beyond.
Perhaps this persistence is how the forget-me-not picked up its other association in folklore: fidelity. There is an oftrepeated medieval story of a German knight who while drowning tossed forget-me-nots he had gathered for his lover, urging her to remember him in perpetuity.
For now, on another rainy and blustery weekend, the flowers serve a different purpose, as if urging us not to forget the warmer times ahead. “Spring’s messenger in every spot,” wrote 19th-century poet John Clare. “Smiling on all – ‘Remember me!’ ”