May blossom in June is a pink and white sensation | Wild flowers
May blossom in June is a pink and white sensation
This article is more than 7 years oldClaxton, Norfolk The hawthorn’s petals are infused with rose, a gloriously subtle hue, like the last residue of juice in a bowl of strawberries and cream
There had to be some benefits to the year’s strange grey iron-clad winter-spring, which persisted right until last month in our area. Now we see those benefits in the late coming of our may blossom. The hedges have turned into great waves of flowering luxuriance and, although the showing was strong in 2013 after its own cold-blasted start, I cannot recall a better hawthorn display.
One wonderful feature is the branches so loaded with blossom that they dangle about the bushes in great tentacles of sweetness. One feels even more enfolded in spring’s plenty. Another intriguing detail is the degree of stronger pink colour in the more typical white tide. The gene creating this effect is presumably the one that was isolated by growers and eventually gave us that coral-flowered hawthorn cultivar that is so beloved of town councils. I have wild bushes near me where a whole outer third of the white petals are infused with rose, and en masse they give it a gloriously subtle hue, like the last residue of juice in a bowl of strawberries and cream.
A secondary pleasure from hawthorn is the wonderfully ambiguous perfume, which, at its best, in the tunnel-like hedges down our lane, is an entire sensory atmosphere. If it smells of flesh, as some people propose, then it is the most innocent of all, reminding me of that wonderful fragrance of newborn babies.
What makes such a landscape-sized display so much more satisfying than any garden flower show are the incidental details that create an entire seasonal moment: the fly-hum veil around the hedges, the morning’s late dew upon your boots, the granular alarm notes of wrens disturbed at their own hawthorn business, ragged outlines of moulting rooks overhead, sedge warblers mimicking linnets, and Hereford cattle clanging the metal gate as they scratch away all that fly itch. Most telling of all, however, is the double act the hawthorns perform with cow parsley so that on many approach roads to Claxton they create the brief white-walled lanes of high spring. They lend to these English latitudes a momentary sense of more tropical climes.
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