The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring
Thoughts on the Change of Seasons
It’s a cliché of English life that we can have four seasons in a single day. And as someone who once tried to play cricket in May while it snowed (fielding at deep third man, since you ask), I know this to be true. Nonetheless, even after a mild Winter — which in England tends to mean wet rather than simply not cold — the anticipation with which we greet the Spring is the equivalent of H. L. Mencken’s definition of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.
Snowdrops and crocuses are well-loved harbingers, although you sort of know that their appearance doesn’t really offer any guarantee that the cold has been banished. This year, I’ve noticed a lot of snowdrops in graveyards, peeping out beneath the gloom of assembled yew trees like shy toddlers on a staircase. I always feel they act to loosen the grip of winter which is quite a sinister image once one conjures up the figure of an old man hanging by his fingertips to the clock of time.
Precisely because I have seen them standing in frosted fields with hail or snowflakes melting around their roots, daffodils have struck me as one of Nature’s chillier blooms. For me, they resemble those acutely self-possessed people at cocktail parties, elegant and cool, with their overwhelming air of not needing anything more than the admiration they effortlessly command. Hence, while I note their arrival as a positive sign, my hope for a new season awaits friendlier flora. In Italy, it comes in the form of wild violets, small flowers that decorate northern lowland woods in a manner reminiscent of English bluebells.
Once you have a bluebell wood, you have a spring. In fact you have a summer approaching.
Back in the day when we all travelled (do remember those days?), spring in different places came with different flowers. I still remember my first experience of azaleas bursting into flower in the hills of Georgia. Some were native, but the gardens in Atlanta’s suburbs probably had some oriental imports. Seasonal travel can deepen an Englishman abroad’s general air of confusion. For me, roses remain very much a summer bloom, but last year I discovered that they arrive in Italy in spring. But this is usually after the mimosa has bloomed. Traditionally, on Women’s Day (March 8) men give the women in their lives a garland of mimosa. Unable to find mimosa in England, I had to offer my Italian wife daffodils since there were still plenty around after St. David’s Day (March 1).
News reports confirm that climate change is confusing the world’s plants, and with risky consequences. They bloom too soon and the frosts get them. Worse yet, pollinating insects or migratory birds arrive expecting to find fresh blossom but it has faded weeks earlier. Spring, like nostalgia, is not what it used to be.
Seasonal travel is not all about beauty, alas. Being a decidedly pale redhead, I was genetically engineered for temperate climes, and possibly cave dwelling. Consequently, the reliable sunshine of the Mediterranean doesn’t entice me as much as it does others. For me, a beach holiday is an exercise in self-defense. Everyone else can luxuriate in the warm waters but the turquoise sea will wash off that mountain of sunblock I have earnestly applied. And those zephyr breezes along the shoreline seem similarly dedicated to the removal of my panama. You will find me seeking solace and liquid refreshment in a shady bar.
In warmer climes, even the sunsets bring me no relief. As twilight descends, the mosquitoes huddle like Giants on a Beanstalk. “Fee-fi-fo-thumb,” I hear them chant, “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” Rumour has it that some of us are unlucky enough to emit a scent in our sweat that resembles the pheromone of the male mosquito, and thus attracts the female. Despite a generous application of repellent, I usually give blood twice a day on summer trips abroad. And that’s in spite of manic efforts to track down that tell-tale buzz in the hotel room at 2 a.m. No matter how many blood-gorged bodies I squash against the wall, there is always one vengeful survivor who has heard that the finest vintage — the Mouton Rothschild of the blood bank — is in town. The thought that in the mosquito world, you are simply irresistible is not an easy one to brush aside. Thus, while the flowers that bloom in the spring, as the Gilbert & Sullivan song declares, “breathe promise of merry sunshine,” they also stir itchy memories of the last summer battle.
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But that’s the essence of seasons — the combination of change and mixture, things you’ve really missed and things you certainly haven’t. So, Mediterranean blue seas and skies will once more be a welcome change from British grey, even if it does mean that my irresistible flesh is added to the mosquito menu of the day as dusk falls. And all this will ultimately set me up to appreciate again the cosiness of an English pub fireside as autumn embraces winter once more. And there’s usually a dog that has a nose for mosquito pheromone.
Thanks again to Ravyne Hawke and Christine Graves and if you have tales of mosquito bites or Spring flowers let me know.
