‘Spring flowering has been a wonder this year’
Easter for me was always moorhens’ speckled duck-sized eggs and their flattened nests hidden among the rushes growing alongside the little river that ran through our farm on the north Norfolk coast. It was the toddling wild ducklings flapping fluffy wings as they followed their frantic mother in the ditches or in the meadow reeds. (Too wet to cultivate, 80 or so years later those same meadows are part of a nature reserve area and are home to avocets and black-tailed godwits, garganey and Chinese geese.) It meant the thrush’s eggs in their rough hazel cup like a miniature coconut, in which blue eggs lay as exciting and alluring as any precious stones.
As a small child I understood Easter was an important time because the hymns in church were special and only sung then. ‘There is a green hill far away’ having extra meaning for me because my middle name is ‘Calvert’ meaning (from the word ‘col’) – ‘green hill’. Little did I know then that I would spend my working life looking after my ‘own’ green hill at Kingley Vale. But I did not understand why it was always on a different date. Christmas Day is always on the same date. Easter jumps around and was never on the same date.
It was ages before I knew that this was all to do with a pagan ritual that took place at the first full moon after the Equinox. The rule being that if you can’t beat them, join them! The Christian religion quite happily took on many a pagan ritual.
Country folk in olden days always planted their potatoes on Good Friday, despite the solemnity given to that day, as they would grow better planted just as the moon became full! Incidentally to me as a child that full moon looked just like a kingfisher’s egg which father had shown me one exciting day.
In those days many village boys collected all those eggs, often just to smash them for fun, and many scientists too to add to their multi-cabinet collections, but to me they were food. They meant food too to most of the marsh-men, who
collected them for sale for the London market. Gulls eggs fed the needy and the aristocratic rich in London as well. Evelyn Waugh knew about this as in the charming little scene in Brideshead Revisited where Sebastian, up at Oxford, is seen offering a plate of plover’s eggs to his friends, saying ‘They always lay early for Mummy’.
Easter is also always associated with flowers. The epitome of which, certainly for me, is Good Friday grass, representing the occasion by its actual name. It is of course ruled not by the Christian observance of a crucifixion, but by the fact that it always blooms around that all-important full moon time soon after the equinox. Good
Friday grass is a slight misnomer, for it actually comes in the wood-rush family. It is a charming almost insignificant looking plant with a cluster head of brown seeds, but a plant to be greeted with joy, as it marks spring returning.
Primroses in the woods have merged into large yellow clumps over the many years (over 50 now) we have lived here. What varies little are the dog violets which sprinkle their blue haze along the edges of the rides, and feed the fritillary butterfly caterpillars in due course – so much more subtle than the all-enveloping bluebells.
This year the spring flowering has been a wonder, especially the delicate little wood anemones – or wind-flowers as they are often called. Make the most of them in your Easter walking – they will soon be over, although the summer flowers will take their place.