May Day magic

For this one day of the year, I could draw you a flower map of my town.

Soft green ferns are unfurling as I walk the lanes with my basket, the hedgerows damp and frothing with hawthorn— the May tree. There is sweetness on the breeze and blackbirds fly over the cow parsley lanes. In the last hours of April, I am gathering blooms to welcome May.

When I first I picked flowers for May Day Posies, my youngest was just weeks shy of his first birthday. I carried him in a sling on my back, his chubby fingers twisting through my hair, reaching into the flowers as I bent to pick a stem of cow parsley here, a sprig of valerian there. His twinkling laugh flowed into the morning, mingling with birdsong. As we wove our way along the back streets of the town, I snipped a couple of blooms at a time into my basket—clematis, overhanging lilac and apple blossom, finishing with bluebells from my garden and miniature yellow roses.

In the afternoon he napped, and the old pine table in my lilac-scented kitchen became littered with stray leaves and scattered petals as I filled empty jam jars with simple twisted bunches. The next morning, his daddy fed him porridge and I walked the streets in the early morning hush, leaving my posies on friends’ doorsteps—an adaptation of the ancient tradition of ‘May Baskets’—a gesture, a revival, a renewal. A reminder of what is not yet lost.

Now, my baby counts down the days until he turns eleven—that first palindromic birthday, age of magic and quests. As I walk the wet lanes, breathing wild garlic, I think of what I have learned from a decade of May Days. I know where to find the apple tree in the churchyard and the overhanging lilac on the corner of the footpath. I can show you the places where cow parsley swishes thickly and hawthorn hangs low. I have watched the trees—and my little one—grow, and I have seen flowers changing with weather—blooming earlier in a warm spring, later in a wet one. For this one day of the year, I could draw you a flower map of my town.

Sometimes now, my boy comes with me to deliver the flowers, sneaking them onto doorsteps, delighting in secret and stealth. For all the years of his life, this has been my May ritual. My friends—who are no longer surprised by the flowers, and yet never presume to expect them—call me the May Day fairy: an empty glass jar and a posy of flowers being the only kind of magic I know.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x