From The Manse Window

ACCORDING to the calendar, and astronomically speaking, the glorious season of spring began at the equinox on Saturday March 20 and will end on Monday June 21.

Thanks to the miracle of growth, our eyes feast on the annual display of beautiful flowers which abound richly in gardens, parks, fields and hillsides!

One of the pleasures of this time of year is the vast array of spring flowers that sprout up from deep below the earth all around us, unfailingly on schedule and so pleasing to the eye!

In earlier years one of my favourite venues was the public park just a stone’s throw from where I lived in Glasgow.

The gardens in Victoria Park were, and I am sure still are, breathtakingly beautiful in springtime.

They are so meticulously planned and laid out and so wonderfully nurtured and cared for by the team of park gardeners.

As you walk around the boating pond you will encounter, in all the adjacent flower-beds and on the rising slopes, flowers and bushes and blossoming trees in all their beauty and colour.

In springtime, right there in the heart of the city, you would be quite overcome with “The glory of the spring, how sweet!” in the words of the old hymn.

Banks of scarlet tulips and dancing daffodils and blue forget-me-nots, rhododendrons and azaleas bursting to life in every hue, and as you would experience the sheer loveliness of it all, I’m sure you would want to say, “Thanks be to God!”

Of course, springtime is one of God’s gifts to all of us, but it’s a particular gift to poets.

It was the sight of a host of golden daffodils that moved the renowned English poet William Wordsworth at a spot near Grasmere in the Lake District to pen his immortal lines in which he “wandered lonely as a cloud . . . that floats on high o’er vales and hills”.

And of course our beloved Robert Burns wrote extensively about nature, wild animals and the loveliness of the Scottish countryside all around him.

He wrote about flowers, too, remember: such as “To a Mountain Daisy”. Unfortunately he chopped off its head with his plough!

It won’t be long until daisies are pushing their way through our lawns, if they’re not doing so already.

We are so thankful to poets like these, who were able to put into lovely words what they saw all around them in the beauty of nature, and especially during spring.

However, whether we can write wonderful poetry about the lovely world of nature or not, we are all, I am quite sure, thankful to God.

Let us never forget that it was he who made the flowers and the hills and the trees and the bushes and the vales and everything else that goes to make up the beautiful world of nature. ■

Next week: Janice Ross celebrates teachers of all disciplines.