Looking closer into the flowers, they too were inhabited, ephemeral worlds – here one minute, gone the next. May was saving the best till last. Perhaps the end days of the month would relapse into cold and wet, but the spring bank holiday weekend was fit to bursting with the white flowering pulse of spring, and the "banks" of holiday were nothing to do with money but the steep wooded slopes of the Edge.
The way into the wood was marked with flowers of stitchwort and cow parsley, white as bellies of house martins over fields and lanes. Inside, among the patches of bluebell, yellow archangel and a few remaining primroses, the dapples of sunlight chased through a cool green like bright fish in water. On the clayey banks of the wood the wild garlic was finally ready. From a spluttering start many weeks ago it was now about to explode; a constellation of countless flowers had appeared from nowhere.
In a patch of sunlight where a huge beech bough had broken some years ago, all the wild garlic had fully opened. My own shadow fell across the flowers. As if the cells that form from conflicts between us and them, between people and Nature, between servitude and freedom, take weight and substance from my violent humanity, this shadow seemed heavily ominous. And yet the songs of chiffchaff and warblers, a clatter of wood pigeons, caw of rooks, and the sough of the wind through the treetops were of this world too. And then there were the banks of wild garlic.
Looking into the flowers, they were full of life: each one a thousand natures, of sex and seeding and strange visitors from places folded inside those woods and the subterranean bulbous dreams to which they would return; mile after mile of white fire sweeping along the Edge.
