Beltane and Bluebells

For May eve we camped out in a little East Sussex wood; we wanted to be out in the fresh new green and jump over our own mini Beltane fire to bring in summer. Also, the area is renowned for its bluebells, of which I am something of a connoisseur.

The weather was cool and damp, the humidity intensifying the depth of the colours  and general sense of lushness and rampant growth. Birdsong seemed astonishingly loud, the only other sounds a constant dripping and the babble of running water.  I felt I could almost be in a high altitude cloud forest anywhere in the world if it were not for the familiarity of the trees and vegetation around me.

There are so many wildflowers all blooming together right now, the harsh winter having telescoped the seasons down until the first late winter flowers stand shoulder to shoulder with summer blooms. And everything is giving it’s best after that winter, including the bluebells.

If you are lucky enough to have been in a bluebell wood in full flower you will know well the extraordinary sensual overload that this can provoke.  You walk along thinking that you’ve already seen it all, it couldn’t possibly get any bluer. Then the trees open out a little more and they are swimming in an astonishing violet mist of overwhelming voluptuousness. This, I can tell you, you have to experience for yourself.

It’s not just the colour, the scent is vivid  too – heady and exotic for something so British, but with a coolness that makes it bearable, like lilies crossed with violets. Sometimes you can smell the flowers long before you see them.

I remember my first sighting of bluebells as a child, and the wonder I felt at their unexpected beauty. My mother wisely told me not to pick a single one, they could never look better in my hand than standing exactly where they were and I understood and did as I was told. Coming back from our walk we saw a family who had not been so wise; they had greedily picked as many as they could carry and were already making disappointed sounds at how swiftly they had wilted. They bore my mothers rage with baffled indifference, but if they learned nothing that day, I had learned plenty.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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Derwentwater Sunset

It’s hard for me to believe that this sunset was little over a month ago – so much has happened since then, summer has all but arrived and I’ve been to so many other places both physically and mentally. It was the evening of our first full day of camping on the shore of Derwentwater, a day of speeding clouds and thick, blanketing drizzle of the kind that is utterly miserable everywhere else but familiar and atmospheric on the fells.

Just as we were starting to cook dinner back at the tent, the clouds parted and we were treated to a spectacular sunset that went on for an hour or more, the clouds that were passing across Catbells somehow still catching sunlight long after higher cloud had bled to grey.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

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