A century and a half ago, when springs were different, the poet John Clare wrote: “All bleaching in the thin March air / the scattered violets lie.” (March Violet). He may have meant violets growing under withered and bleached nettle stems, but for me, today, there are shining white violets “bleaching” on the hedge bank in one of the last cold, grey, “thin” mornings in March.
Even though there are beautifully subtle violet violets scattered in the mossy shadows under trees and through the emerging leaves beneath hedges, the eye is drawn to the white ones. I wonder if bees prefer white violets to violet-coloured violets? The more common forms have ultraviolet markings on their petals called bee guides, which look like veins filled with iodine and must be as vivid as rope lights to insects.
Violets are hermaphrodites anyway, so they don’t rely on pollinators, which, given the scarcity of bees at this time of year, and their continued decline in Britain, is just as well.
This is the blackthorn winter, that moment at the end of March when a snow of white flowers – from blackthorn, wild damson and cherry to wood anemone and white sweet violets – pulses through woods and hedgerows. This marks the becoming time of spring, when fragments of those seasonal signatures – wildflowers and birdsong, bumblebees and lambs – begin to join into a coherence, or at least the fantasy of one, that feels like spring.
I wonder what Clare’s springs were like, when the populations of birds, insects and wildflowers were so much stronger and seasonal differences more acute. What would he make of this?
Violets have a built-in nostalgia, a belonging to something that is only ever new and so always fleeting and longed for. “Keep love for youth, and violets for the spring,” wrote the poet Christina Rossetti (in Autumn Violets).
Violets really do gladden the heart and, like love, they need nurturing; Clare for one could not help but follow his instincts as a gardener, to clear the winter debris from around the violets “And give them room to grow”.
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