The Green Fuse.

With what Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, Spring advances anyway. Two swallows zip through the farmyard and are gone, to some remembered beacon further north, snipping up the air as they go. A small dust-devil whips-up behind them, as if, for all the world, they caused it. A narrow, spinning vortex of dust, grit-in-the-eye, chaff and a weathered crisp-packet, whirls up and then dissipates into a hiss, and absolute silence.

I descend the hard set-ruts into the woods. The tractor-tyre chevrons, pressed into the wet chalk paste of February have hardened to a concrete crust that might last all Summer.

The green fuse has pushed the subtle, beaded flowers of dog’s mercury out, as well as the furled flags of cuckoo pint, above their spotted leaves. Were we ever so close to it all? Have we ever paid this much attention to noticing? I like to think so, but it was likely long ago.

I love the contrasting colourways of primrose and dog violet best. That particular butter-cream, lemon-yellow with parma-violet mauve. They are delightfully vintage colours that, were I a dress designer, I’d make my Spring-print signature. It is a colourway complimented by china-blue wood forget-me-not with its yolk-yellow and white centres, and in the sudden emergence of bluebells overnight and their yellow archangel companions.

There is a lavender haze washing through the wood where there was just a hint of it the day before. In the derelict hazel coppice, the bluebell’s honey-scent mingles with stronger, heady, cherry laurel blossom that, along with western red cedar, crowds out and shades the bluebells, closes the canopy, blocks the light. Still, they persist. A light breeze weaves through the wood and there is the faint squeak of jostled bluebell stems, and the squeal of hazel poles grown too thick for coppicing.

Orange-tip butterflies tumble over garlic mustard and I am absorbed, watching a furry, ginger, bee-fly insert the long, sharp-looking (but harmless) straw of its proboscis into the creamy churns of white dead nettle flowers (that also, do not sting). I nip one of the blossoms between thumb and forefinger, and tip its flask onto my tongue, for a drop of sweet nectar. 

By the time I am home, there are four swallows twittering over the house. The clustered white stars of windflowers, or wood anemones tremble in an imperceptible breeze. I resisted picking the first one I saw, weeks ago, to tuck into my collar, to ward off Spring fever.