A NEIGHBOUR crossing the field stopped by the garden fence the other morning. Her young black Labrador put her head and paws on the gate, whining for attention, but when she heard our next door neighbour at his hedge, dashed off. He is her favourite on this side of the village.
Her owner was holding a large bunch of furled daffodils, which she had just picked in the woods – which she owns – for a friend for Easter. They came from a coppice, where the badgers live, where she planted bulbs many years ago. Thanks to her, in a wood on the other side of the field, the undergrowth is also thick with yellow heads, waving at us in the breeze.
Because of the high winds, every morning lately I’ve been collecting sagging or snapped daffodil stems. We have jugfuls throughout the house, scenting the air like a florist’s. Before bringing them in, dripping with sap, I pick off tiny curled caterpillars or miniature beetles, which would not enjoy being indoors.
A few days ago I had to dig out extra vases when a neighbour brought us a huge bunch from her garden. There were the olde worlde native flowers, with their pale lemony petals, along with narcissi, and brash bold golden flutes, which make a statement, like a blast from Louis Armstrong’s band.
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Thanks to our stinginess with the central heating, they last longer here than in cosier houses. When a shaft of sunlight catches them, the effect is electrifying, as if their corner has suddenly burst into sulphurous flame. Van Gogh had his sunflowers, but if he had been raised in the British countryside, perhaps daffodils would have taken centre stage.
Not everyone likes them, though. I read one gardener who suggests that the ‘daffodil police’ ought to uproot all the so-called feral clumps found scattered around the countryside. Their natural environment, he claims, is in towns and cities, in gardens or parks, rather than open country.
Tell that to William Wordsworth. He conferred literary immortality on them, thanks to discovering a wild colony on a walk along Ullswater with his sister Dorothy. Dorothy recorded in her journal: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their head upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing”.
I’ve written before of how much I love snowdrops, hinting that new life is on its way, even if temporarily buried beneath frozen earth. Daffodils, on the other hand, bring an entirely different message. They are synonymous with cold weather, with sleet, hailstones or, as this past week, with sub-zero temperatures and snow. Perhaps it’s the contrast between the summery yellow and the never-ending winter into which they arrive that makes their appearance feel like a mixed blessing.
This year emotions are particularly torn, with the tedium and longueur of never-ending lockdown sinking all but the hardiest of spirits. For a village renowned for its hospitality and sociability, the past few months have been tough. There was good news a few days ago, however, when it was announced that the annual cricket match, held in the paddock behind our garden, would be taking place. The date is in August, but I wouldn’t be surprised to look out one morning soon, and see people already setting up their deck chairs, in anticipation of long-awaited and much-deserved conviviality.
That apart, it is hard to know when our old way of life will return. You can almost hear people champing at the bit, like the horses that pass daily along the road.
It’s increasingly obvious how small our worldview has become – or mine, certainly. I’ve become obsessed with a mouse hole in the rockery, which was covered up by birds (or so I assume), only for the mouse or vole to make an exit a foot away, which hole was also promptly covered with stones and moss by the following morning. Clearly there’s a lot going on out there, under cover of dark. It says much for the narrowness of my life, though, that such tiny incidents have come to assume the sort of fascination formerly inspired by dramatic High Court trials or page-turning thrillers.
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As springtime advances, lambs are taking over the landscape, with daffodils as the backdrop. Catching a gulp of fresh air one morning, I took a brisk walk down the brae towards the church. The sound of bleating filled the air. Clumps of daffs on an easterly wall were still to flower, but a few metres away month-old lambs were being corralled into pens. Their owners treated them as if they were pre-schoolers being coaxed in from the playground.
These lambs are beauties: sturdy, long-legged, lively. Their mothers are a breed I’ve only ever seen around here: enormous, with folds of crinkly fleece around their necks. If a labradoodle ever tried to pass itself off as a sheep, this is what it would look like. And yet the lambs are beautiful. Some are pearly, others the colour of dairy milk chocolate apart from below the knees, as if they have waded through a bath of 85% cocoa dark chocolate.
Around here, there are almost as many brown and black sheep as white. A gingery brown flock, with triangular white-marked faces, huddles together clannishly on the approach to the village. They are wonderful, like a glimpse of a hillside in the middle east. Could they be Zwartbles, a Netherlands breed? Nobody can say.
Meanwhile, we await the arrival at the garden gate of our annual flock of Texels, brought from the farm on the nearby hill. They are little bruisers, almost as wide as they are high, with legs as short as a sofa’s. The field is crying out for their attention, but it is tempting to let them into our patch for a few hours, to tidy things up. You get some idea of what our garden looks like by the fact that twice in the past week we’ve been asked if we were considering keeping sheep. Even if we did, it would never be flat enough for cricket.
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