Three warm days in a row and the longed-for spring had arrived. In a week there would be drifts of wood anemones and primroses everywhere, but on this day I went in search of two of the supporting cast in the annual floral pageant.
I saw the white flowers of whitlow grass (Erophila verna) as I climbed over the stile in the wall. Here it grows on meadow ant nests on a south-facing slope. In some years it blooms in such profusion that each hummock seems snow capped. This year it wasn’t so plentiful, but then 10 days ago this field was covered by snow.
Whitlow grass is a winter annual, germinating in late autumn, ready to bloom in March, a pioneer in the spring flora. Each plant is only 5cm (2in) tall and its deeply cleft petals and yellow stamens can only really be appreciated on hands and knees, preferably with a magnifying glass.
My next stop was to visit the townhall clock colony (Adoxa moschatellina), under an old hazel hedge planted on a bank of boulders that must have been cleared from the field generations ago. As with the whitlow grass, I’ve know this colony for the 40 years I’ve walked these paths and during that time it has hardly increased in size.
You need to be very close to appreciate the almost luminous green of the moschatel’s strange cuboid inflorescence, with four of its flowers facing outwards each with 10 stamens, and the fifth, with only eight stamens, pointing skywards.
While I was down there I tried to detect the almond scent that field guides describe and that I once fancied I could smell. But nothing, just the humic aroma of damp earth. A dulling of my sense of smell with advancing years, perhaps, and a reminder that as time passes every spring becomes more precious than the last.
For reassurance I crushed one of the freshly expanded meadowsweet leaves next to it and immediately picked up its antiseptic scent, reminiscent of a herbal healing ointment that was applied to grazed knees when I was a child.
Some of the joys of spring come to greet you, others need to be searched for.
