Love List: May

one precious week | ancient landscape | the invisible tug of everything

Is there anywhere more romantic than the green lanes of May in the hour before sundown? New spring leaves and grasses are so bright that as we step out onto the path, colour closes around us like the surface of a pool. All along the edges, cow parsley swishes and shimmers in the last of the light, its sweet scent rising into the evening—a sprinkling of golden buttercup heads and pink petals of red campion dotted through the clouds. On the path, puddles shine mirror-clear, reflecting flowers and sky. We pass a tree filled with the trilling chatter of a small flock of goldfinches, and pause to watch the humming of their wings.

My husband pushes open a wooden five bar gate and we follow the path into a field where hedges froth with hawthorn blossom, the grass scattered with glowing globes of dandelion clocks. High above us, a raven swoops and caws as we stop on the ridge to look down at the town in the valley. In a house below the opposite hill, our children are curled up on the sofa, the oldest teenager clutching a pile of revision notes. For now, it is just the two of us, in this rare May moment under a peach-swirled pale blue sky. He takes my hand as we walk along the edge of the hillside and clamber over a stile, immersing ourselves again into the hypnotic green of the lane.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: