Monday portraits tend to showcase subjects from the animal kingdom. But we have just said ‘Goodbye’ to my daughter and granddaughter: a week together in which blogging played no part. Anaïs delighted in wandering among the daffodils: she’d never seen any in sunny Spain. Here’s a snapshot of one of those moments.
These daffodils appear days after Christmas.
Just beside the village pond.
This year and every single year.
The news just seems to get grimmer. So I stepped out into the garden to find cheering daffodils to share. Here.
The WordPress photo challenge this week is ‘Beloved’.
I don’t think the humans in my life whom I love would be happy for me to plaster their images all over the blogosphere. I have no pets, beloved or otherwise. So I’ll have to look a little further.
Here’s a little miscellany of images, beloved images:
I’ll end though with this. I wasn’t beloved of this elephant in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, who was only doing his job when I visited him ten years ago on my Indian Adventure. But I felt beloved and very special when he raised his trunk and brought it down upon my shoulder – his very distinctive way of blessing me.
Click on any image to see a slideshow of the photos, full-size.
I was out for a convalescent constitutional this afternoon: William had passed A Bug onto me last week, and I’ve been a little delicate. I hadn’t taken my camera with me, only my phone, so these images aren’t the finest. But I don’t care. They’re evidence that spring is on the way. I wish you could hear, as I could, the birds singing as they do only when they too know that short winter days have passed. Yes, spring is springing.
A picture is worth a thousand words and all that… so here are some shots taken in the garden of a few spring time moments. Happy Easter!
When I realised that we were likely to move from France to England in the Spring, I immediately became anxious – no – panic-stricken, at the thought that this year we might be too late to enjoy one of the glories of English life: daffodils. Of course, there are daffodils in France, and spectacularly so in hidden woodlands such as the one we visited last April.
But whilst the French have daffodils, they don’t do daffodils as we do here. All over England, they’re in pots in urban courtyards, crowded into suburban gardens, rambling over country gardens. They form part of the roadside verges on tiny D roads, march along urban by-passes and ring roads, line dual carriageways, and romp across traffic roundabouts. Householders buy them two and three bunches at a time and place jugs and vases full of them all over their homes.
I shouldn’t have worried. Since the moment we arrived, they’ve been at their spectacular best. It’s impossible to feel anything but joyful when passing by whole armies of those bright yellow flowers nodding cheerfully in the breeze.
And goodness knows, we’ve needed distracting from the tasks in hand. Since we arrived ten days ago, we’ve found a home to rent, started the daunting process of re-registering our car in the UK (you can’t buy a tax-disc without having an English MOT, you can’t get an English MOT without an English number plate, you can’t get an English number plate until….. you get the picture), organised moving our goods, registered ourselves hither and yon, started the process of catching up with British friends, tried to maintain contact with French friends…..
…and finally, of course, I’ve changed the title of the blog. The header, showing our transition from the Pyrenees to the Pennines, was master-minded by our friend, the talented amateur photographer Richard Bown. He already has a family history blog, but I really hope he’ll begin a photography blog soon and share some of his fantastic images with you. If he does, I’ll let you know. Because you will want to subscribe.
*William Wordsworth: ‘The Daffodils’
We’ve all had it. Months and months of horrible weather. Especially rain. Even now, when things are slowly picking up here, we expect to have all kinds of weather within a single day. Beautifully hot skin-warming sun may be followed by lashing winds, summer showers, or deluging heavy downpours. Glance up at the sky, and it will be in turn a cloudless azure, or bright blue patched with blowsy puffs of white cumulus. Or it may be grey, or even black. If the clouds aren’t coursing lazily across the heavens, they may be tearing across the sky so swiftly that they’ll have disappeared from view if you glance away only for a few moments. The rivers are still full to overflowing.
Farmers are in a mess. They’ve only just begun to cut their hay, when normally they’d be onto their second harvest. Seeds have failed to germinate in the cold and wet. Often they haven’t been planted at all in the sodden and waterlogged fields. Preparations to take cattle and sheep up into the highland summer pastures have had to be postponed, with snow still on the ground at higher levels.
At last though, we walkers are once more getting out and about. We choose our routes with care, because thick sticky mud has made some of our favourite walks unuseable. Where we can walk though, spring has at last sprung. Familiar paths have become narrow passages edged by massed armies of knee-high grasses, shocking in their vibrant greenness. And our favourite spring flowers that by now should be sun-shrivelled and long past their best romp across meadows and pastureland, and spread across their favourite sun-warmed stones. Here are a few that we’ve enjoyed finding in the last days and weeks.
UPDATE: After she’d read this post, a kind friend, AnnA, wrote to a botanist friend of hers enlisting help in identifying the flowers I’ve shown. Here’s some of what she said. Reading from the top, left to right:
2. Globulaire rampante – Globularia repens (Creeping Globularia)
3. Hélianthème – Helianthemum Alpestre (Alpine rock rose)
5. Perhaps from the Linacée family. She needs a photo of the leaves. Watch this space
6. Céphalanthère à longues feuilles – Cephalanthera longifolia (Sword-leaved Helleborine)
8. Oeillet – Dianthus – (Dianthus). She needs more info. to help her be more precise.
She’s asked to see more of the leaves, and to be told as well where the flowers were found and at what altitude. There’s such a lot to it. I had no idea and am so grateful for all this help.
Once upon a time long ago in Caraybat, when times were hard, the men of this small village had to look far afield for work. And they went to Spain, for the hay-making season. Hawkers came to the village, and peddlers. They found a village with no men. They took advantage. So did the women.
When the hay-making season was over, the men returned, and the women spied them returning over the distant mountains. Suddenly ashamed and frightened, they fled to the hills. God, in vengeful and Old Testament mood, was displeased. As the women reached the summit, he turned each one of them to stone. And there they are to this day, les demoiselles de Caraybat, a petrified reminder of a summer of sin.
We remembered this legend yesterday when I took our Laroquais walking friends to Caraybat and the dolomies to discover those daffodils I’d been shown on Thursday. I was quite chuffed that not a single one of them had previously known this special spot, and we had a pleasant hour up on the rocks, picnicking and enjoying the last days of the daffodil season.
We followed the walk I’d learnt about on Thursday, and then we finished our day by going to the plateau above Roquefixade to see the gentians there.
Sadly, it was by then rather cold and windy, and most of the gentians had sensibly folded their indigo skirts about their faces and tucked themselves away to wait for a sunny day. We’ll wait too. And when the sun comes out properly, we’ll be back.
I had a very pressing reason for wanting to come back to England for a few weeks. I couldn’t wait for April, much less May. The March heat wave made me worry that already I might be too late: I needed to see daffodils.
Of course the French have daffodils in their gardens too. Well, some people do. You can even find them, delicate and lemon-hued up in the woods. But nothing to compare with our English exuberance.
Here, regiments of daffodils march down the edges of inner-city dual carriageways. Swathes of them along the verges announce the entrance to almost every town. Shopping centres have great tubs full. Gardens, whether tiny gravelled spaces in front of town terraces, cottage style plots, or more extensive lawned affairs, all boast generous clumps of brilliant yellow trumpets swaying in the breeze.
Nothing else makes me so aware that winter’s on the way out. Not the blossom slowly unfurling on the trees, nor the spears of green thrusting through the soil and moss on every country walk, and in every garden. Of course I love these too. But for me, nothing but those bright assertive confident flowers can state quite so definitely – even defiantly – ‘Spring is here!’
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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