The lanes are luminous with the white pulse of May: cow parsley, hawthorn, hogweed, garlic, stitchwort. In fields there are pale lambs and dandelion clocks and stands of horse chestnut in candle. White on green. Green on white.
It is evening and the birds are fractious. I am listening to an old story so nearly forgotten that its retelling sounds strange and new.
Back in town, swifts are careering around the church tower and poking under eaves like estate agents on speed. Down the lane, blackbirds rancour and thrushes won’t finish sentences. The waysides are quiet, bees are drawn aloft by the scent of dangly sycamore flowers and the big trees murmur. The ash have finally woken from northern dreams and are slowly filling in their gaps.
This is the cow parsley moment, its blossom making foamy bow waves against hawthorn hedges along the road – Dante Gabriel Rossetti described such a scene as “visible silence” in his poem Silent Noon.
Although it has been a prominent verge plant for centuries Anthriscus sylvestris has become much more prolific in recent years, a phenomenon that may be due to the way hedges are flailed and verges polluted by traffic fumes and fertilisers, but its whiteness in the fading light is visionary, as are the bergs of may blossom above it.
In his forthcoming book, Among the Summer Snows, Christopher Nicholson talks about the way both snow and fog appear to gather the light and glow, a phenomenon called the Purkinje shift, where our eyes adjust to changing light conditions. So it is with white cow parsley and may blossom in the gloaming.
I am drawn down the lane by an invisible sound beyond the visible silence. The story I’m listening to has one word with two syllables: cuck-oo, cuck-oo. A cuckoo! The first I’ve heard here in a long while, calling from an oak. I had come to believe that if the cuckoo didn’t return, it never would and we’d just have to lump it. But no, this is the song of joy. Something’s right with the world. For once.
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• The headline on this article was amended on 24 May 2017 to better reflect the content of the piece, and the misspelling of stitchwort has been corrected.
