Hazel catkins are limp, in a still brightness they hang fire, waiting. After the thrashing they got from Storm Doris it’s a wonder they survived, let alone have any pollen left, but from woods and hedges, unimpeded by leaves, the magic dust cloud drifts for wider fertilisation. The pollen record found in peat bogs shows an expansion of hazel during the Mesolithic, 11,000 – 6,000 years ago and the speculation is that travelling people transported hazel nuts, so that now, catkins dangle from here to the Caucasus and Algeria.
There are daisies in Doris’s debris. Flowering among storm-strewn lime branches in the park, Anglo-Saxon speakers here a thousand years ago would’ve called them daes eage, day’s-eye, a wonderfully simple poetry that has since become a much more complicated symbolic chain-link of love, innocence and death. When the poet Keats was ready for pushing up the daisies, he felt them growing on his grave. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was taken with lesser celandine – the collapsed stars now unfolding below the wood bank. He may have been a user of their petals cooked in lard to make an ointment for treating piles, but it was more likely to be his enthusiasm for them as symbols of the returning sun that had them carved on his tombstone.
As I’m looking at the hazel catkins, daisies and celandines, I become aware of a group of birds in a blackthorn hedge. They are nuthatch – grey-backed, ginger-breasted, black-eye-striped little birds, usually seen singly and to see four together is surprising. What’s a collective noun for these nuthatch? I think it may be a gidding – as in Little Gidding from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Between them, the nuthatch form a quadrangular space in the hedge and it reminds me of what Eliot called, “…the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere.” The gidding of nuthatch fly off across a field where redwings, too agitated about leaving to be counted, call constantly to each other with a question: When? And they complete Eliot’s line, “Never and always.”
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