It has been a long wait for the first really warm days of spring. Perhaps that was why there were so few flying insects about until the second week in April. A reliable guide to the first really warm (shirtsleeves) day is the emergence of the orange-tip butterfly. My first one was on April 13th, in the garden. It had already been beaten by holly blue and green-veined white. All three emerged from their chrysalis this year. The peacocks and brimstones you see emerged last year and have survived hibernation over the winter. By mid-April, the village’s oil beetles – those big, black, flightless beetles you see on sunny banks – made a delayed appearance. If you have lungwort in your garden, you may have seen a big black bee, the Hairyfooted flower-bee, another sign that spring is here at last. It often nests in the crumbling mortar of old buildings, and so, like the swift, has good taste in architecture.
By late March, the wooded verges in outlying parts of the parish were a delightful mixture of spring flowers: primrose and stitchwort spangled with celandines along with wood anemones and the less well known moschatel and barren strawberry (so named because it produces only hard little nuts, not delicious strawberries). Bluebell was coming into flower by early April, and by the mid-month was well out in the woods bordering Hilldrop Lane, with its delicious cool fragrance wafting over the road. Oak had burst into its tendril-like catkins, just ahead of the tender leaves, by which time the smother of catkin blossom on willows and sallows was already going over. Like us, wild willows and sallows are dioecious, that is, the trees are either male or female. Male catkins are at first furry (‘pussy willows’) and then golden with stamens. Female catkins are narrower and spikier. I make no comment.
Sallow catkins are important sources of nectar and pollen for insects in the early spring. Early bees and comma butterflies love them, as do many spring moths. Listen to their lovely names: powdered Quaker, blossom underwing, swallow prominent, red chestnut, brindled beauty, silver cloud. I think the monickers of our moths are one of the small wonders of nature.
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