April hedgerow ramblings…

I took a short ramble at the weekend, down the lane, taking a little time to find the flowers appearing in the hedgerow. First of the violets, old fashioned - my gran’s favourite flower, dog violets she called them - and primroses to support my celandines. Tiny flowers popping up through the greening grass, bringing a smile to my hopeless, old, ugly, useless face for a moment.

So hopeful the hedgerows of spring and early summer, I ramble on. The yellows and whites soon to turn pink, and red, and blue as summer flowers arrive. Later, as summer grows fat, they hide as the bracken and grass grow tall before the tractor blade comes to slash it all down.

Still rambling, I move forward to the patient waiting of bramble hedge as blackberries and dog rose hips swell into life. Picked, burst, eaten as they gently drift to leafless sleep becoming stark and structured by late, low winter light.

Rambling, rambling, I found a meadow cranesbill once when boy, bright blue and long hunted for, found by stream and illuminated in a single shaft of light. A rambling memory of a perfect summer’s day, my only Holy Grail - picked, carefully carried home protected by a boy’s sunburnt arm, pressed, carefully stuck into my scrapbook. That scrapbook my school summer project, wild flowers, over a hundred and twenty different found that summer, such long summers back then.

I didn’t win the prize. Caroline Jones won the prize with fewer flowers and carefully copied descriptions from an I-Spy book.

Rambling. So long ago. Rambling.