IT was on a mid-February morning that a westerly brought the first hints of spring. Since then, despite hesitancy and downright back-tracking—snow at Easter, a sheen of dew each April dawn— the hints have become a pledge, something to hang our hopes on after a frightful year.
On that first morning of promise, I sat with my back against the abandoned bowling pavilion, eyes screwed tight to the rising sun, and listened to the birdsong from the surrounding trees, mingled with the dog walkers’ ritual pleasantries. When I’d warmed up, lizard-like, and the pink glow behind my eyelids had become uncomfortably bright, I walked down to the little ornamental strip that’s fenced off from the rest of the park. There’s a streamlet here, landscaped long ago down some mossy steps for the soothing plash, and also a stand of bamboo and some exotic trees. Around all these had sprung up, seemingly overnight, an ecumenical array of snowdrops and crocuses. The pure white snowdrops depended over the grass and the crocuses, all different confessions of yellow and purple, stood proud in their little mitres.
Esta historia es de la edición May 12, 2021 de Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
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A very good dog
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
