A little while ago we all enjoyed seeing swathes of little white snowdrops everywhere. Then we had a season of yellow as daffodils burst into flower. Last month we has a spectacuar display of pink cherry blossom on the trees. (This seems to have been an exceptional year for blossom). Now we are greeted by all things blue.
When walking through the park I always stop to enjoy the flower bed that runs just inside the railings along the back of the park. This week the first thing I saw was bluebells. They are at their best when they run wild around the trees. There are far more here than my photo suggests. They remind me of childhood days when my older sister Dorothy would take me for walks through the bluebell woods. In those days you were free to pick a few and I remember at the age of seven being so dissapointed when the bunch I proudly presented to my teacher was put on a windowsill at the back of the room. It turned out she suffered badly from hayfever but didn't want to upset me by refusing them!
Dotted amongst the bluebells were some taller spires of star-like flowers, These are Carmassia; not a native to England but seemingly quite happy here.
Next came Alkanet, which many folk see as a weed, but it is the truest blue of all the flowers and deserves a place in the flower bed. Again they triggered a memory. As a child I had a clear 'carrying' voice, which came in useful when I became a teacher. Because of it, and the fact I had a good memory for 'parrot' learning, I was often chosen to learn a poem to recite at the church anniversary service, and one year my poem mentioned Speedwell, which is a very sweet little pale blue, rather insignificant flower. So instead I clutched a bunch of Alkanet picked from the rough ground around the church, while I did my recitation.
And lastly as I walked along the park railings, I came to this amazing clutch of forget-me-nots. And yes, they have a meaning for me too. For most of my life I have loved the Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. She wrote botanically correct poems about every common wild flower and cultivated one, as well as some berry and blossom trees. And every poem was illustrated with a fairy whose clothes and wings matched the flowers the poem was about. She took inspiration for the fairy faces from the faces of the children in her sister's nursery. I always loved the sweet pea fairy which shows an older fairy fitting a sweet pea bonnet on her baby sister. But the poem that has always stayed with me is the poem for the Forget-me-not fairy.
"Where do baby fairies lie until they're old enough to fly,
Here's a likely place I think, 'mid these flowers blue and pink.
Pink for girls and blue for boys, pretty things for baby toys..........
O how glad I am I found you, with forget-me-nots around you,
Blue, the colour of the sky, Fairy baby, Hushaby.
So what a nostalgic walk I had, and how lovely are the blue flowers this week.
I even have some in my garden. There were some little anemone bulbs in a box of mixed spring flowers that planted back in the Autumn, and now I have a pot of pretty daisies.
And at this house I have inherited a mass of the little ground cover companulas. They grow out of the walls, up the steps, over the paths and anywhere there is a patch of ground. And right now they are smothered in buds with the first few showing their purple-blue colour.
I have also moved the pots that have been emptied and replanted, over to the gravel, and as yet untamed area, so that our patio is clear. The builders will be back in next week to start on the new bathroom, and they will need somewhere to put their rubbish until we get another skip.
Here, to finish, are my two faithful friends who come to see me every day. They watched my digging with eyes like hawks and hopped straight in for anything tasty that they spotted. They both look black here but the one on the right is quite brown, and I am sure they are a mating pair.
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