What a strange spring this has been: mostly wet, often cold. By mid-May the tallest poplars, some of the still-living ash, and even our garden maple, were still bare. Some oaks were greening, with tender but rapidly expanding leaves, but others were still at the coppery, bud-burst phase. Some wild flowers, such as wood anemone, have had a poor season, but the rain produced a bumper crop of others, including lords-and-ladies, our wild arum-lily, with its pale green hood and poker-shaped flower known as a spadix. The field by Harbrook, sown with wild flowers of local provenance over twenty years ago, was a sight to see with its acres of bright yellow cowslips. In our ash-hazel copses, bluebells were in their usual abundance by late April, and in one wood I was shown around fifty early purple orchids as well as a woodland buttercup called goldilocks, both scarce in our area. The bad weather did not seem to affect the blossoming of blackthorn, wild cherry, wild apple and hawthorn. One stretch of the hedge running from Ambrose Farm to West Lodge consists of the uncommon hybrid between blackthorn and wild plum, which blossoms a little earlier than blackthorn (not to be confused with cherry plum which flowers earlier still).
Insects, I would say, have had a terrible season, with far fewer bees and other flying insects. When the temperature struggled over 10 degrees one was relieved to see the odd orange-tip, green-veined white and speckled wood butterfly in a very late season. Insects can quickly bounce back after these cold springs, unless the latter become a trend, but they do need enough wild flowers for nectar and pollen - which is why the marshy meadows by the river are so important, as are the road verges with their dandelions, buttercups and cow parsley. Do we need to cut them quite so often?
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