Let’s have a few days by the sea this summer, we said. Let’s enjoy walks on the beach and cliffs, ice creams in the sunshine, maybe even paddle in the sea! But of course the British weather had other ideas. So while we did enjoy our few days away this week, and did indeed go for walks and eat ice cream, sunshine was in very short supply.
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WIt took its time, but towards the end of June summer finally arrived in London. Overnight it seemed we went from cool and dull early spring days to a heatwave, with temperatures briefly touching thirty degrees Celsius. But throughout the month, whatever the weather, our gardens sprang into life and there were flowers everywhere!
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Jean De La Bruyere, French philosopher, said that, 'We come too late to say anything which has not been said already', but I am hopeful that I am better late than never.
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This year our dreary spring has continued into this, one of my favourite months, with only a few brighter days. We did have one glorious weekend in the middle of the month, with temperatures more like summer than spring. But we also had more grey days and more wet ones.
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Who doesn’t love flowers? Very few people indeed, I am sure. And by extension, who doesn’t love a flower photo? Of course, no photo can fully convey the beauty, and no scents were ever appreciated through an image.
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I can remember a time when wildflowers were always just that, wild. They grew randomly in places where they had self-seeded, in hedgerows or on verges. In towns they were too often seen as weeds, not part of the gardener’s plans. If we were lucky they might pop up in odd corners of our urban concrete jungles, softening them and giving us a lift whenever we spotted them.
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While not exactly stormy, spring this year has definitely been wet and quite often cooler than normal. Yes, there have been odd days when it felt like winter was well behind us, with warm sunshine giving us all a lift. But within a couple of days the clouds had descended, the thermometer dropped, and the rain returned.
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'When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.' I find it hard to believe that I haven’t used that quote from Ansel Adams before!
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A bonus I didn’t expect when joining a local photography group was that one of the members would own a patch of woodland. A wood that at the moment is full not of picnicking bears but of bluebells and other early spring flowers.
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Sitting on the plane that brought us home from Mexico we were congratulating ourselves on our timing. Tomorrow would be the first of March, and spring, we thought, just around the corner. We should have known better! Although in the fairly recent past (most notably the lockdown spring of 2020) we’ve had some wonderful March weather, this time last year I was writing that, ‘With a slow start to the spring this year it’s felt at times as if March was coming in more like a polar bear than a lion!’ And so it was again this year.
