Pottering

      

  And azuring-over greybell makes

Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

Gerald Manley Hopkins

It is that time of year, I cannot go to a wood covered in bluebells for two reasons, one because my heart would break without Paul, the other of course is leaving home in this time of stay-at-home.  Somewhere years ago I wrote about the bluebell, nonscriptus, but it has vanished, and each year I fall once more in love with this magical moment of extreme blueness......

But there are a trace of bluebells in the garden, they raise their stubborn heads in the lawn and over the road in the verge there is a strong clump of their dark blue flowers, telling of long ago when once this area was woodland.  The above come from Blake's Wood, Essex.
Well somewhere I had written about them but can't find the blog.  Grigson gives the Latin name Endymion nonscriptus which has fallen out of fashion now and there is a new name.
And to quote Hopkins once more "In falls of sky- colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein blue".  They are often seen as blue harebells in the middle ages. And even Shakespeare mentions them.  It is difficult to describe the effect this flower has on the psyche of the British people, it is the massed blue ranks of their sweet smelling flowers  amongst the shaded area of the woods they grow in.  Then they are gone and summer is on its way.

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I came across this old blog as well with Yeat's poem in it, it captures the history we walk over every time we walk anywhere.

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather; unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the crash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew.

Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

Taken from from The Valley of the Black Pig by Yeats.

The weather was grey and misty, but everywhere had the vivid colour of spring, a green depth that only a rain-soaked land like ours is capable of producing. As I hunted for the plants, Moss also found his great treasures, they comprised of the scents of pheasants and grouse, (which he missed) fox and a badger sett; as he stood triumphantly at the entrance to this last find, sadly I forgot to photograph him. The sett is in a little copse just by the old Langridge barrows, several entrances going deep underground into the copse. It was here in this field with the ladies smock and a bank of cowslips, that the wild orchids will appear later on. 

The poem and the walk of course are threaded together, sometimes the 'presence' of words, ideas, nature and history long gone, are so evocative as to imprint the very air with their images. It is at these moments that such ideas as 'anima mundi' come into being, the holistic nature of the world around us. The dawn chorus is at its most vibrant, the colour of the leaves are fresh and new, there is a benign warmth in the air, a 'spirit of life' walks this particular patch of earth, the ghosts of the past are perhaps called forth - yet they are invisible. Yeats measured the futility of battle, against the long dead occupants of the cairn; the small people toiling in the field as people died for a greater glory, which of course is no glory.