At the top of the hill, where the skylarks sing, a blackthorn bower blooms in the springtime. Gnarled old bushes curve their way across the path, creating a snow-tunnel of blossom that passes into ancient hedgerow and leads along the ridge to the edge, where the town unfolds below like a picture postcard. I have heard blackthorn called a fairy tree—some say it’s bad luck to bring these flowers inside, that to do so risks angering fairies or witches (who were thought to use blackthorn wood to make their wands). Whilst I do not pick blackthorn blossom (I prefer to avoid those long, sharp thorns), like a moth to a flame I am drawn to its brightness, a white beacon in the winter-dulled hills. As I step into the blackness beneath the creamy froth of the blackthorn bower, following a light-speckled path deep into the hedge, I wonder whether magic will enfold me. Will I find myself changed when I emerge into sunshine at the other side?
I first discovered this bower in that strange, frozen spring four years ago, when everything stopped and our world shrank to home and the immediate countryside. Each day, my husband and I took our boys out walking: into woods, up slopes, through valleys. Over months, we followed almost every footpath that circumnavigates our town under the hill, eventually coming to understand the network of fields, paths and byways as an interconnected whole. In that time when so much was taken from us, this deep new love of our particular place was a gift. Tramping on day by day, we forged with our feet an unbreakable connection to the hills and fields—we became part of the landscape, and the landscape became part of us.
Today, I can show you the spot where blackthorn litters the path with its pale petal confetti, and tell you of a secret track through the trees, star-scattered with wood anemones. I can find verges that glitter with celandine gold and take you to the clearing where emerald wild garlic leaves—the taste of spring—grow most thickly, for I carry within me a map of the springtime. Back in that strange spring, I remember my boys picking garlic leaves by the handful and eating them raw in the woods. I think of my children back then—running between the trees with sticks held in muddy hands, their laughter ringing out into the clear air—and I know that this landscape will forever be a part of them, that its sights and scents will flutter at the edges of their consciousness in years to come. As they grow, change and move away, I hope that the land will always sing to them as it sings now to me.
Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: