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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/27/its-getting-steamy-in-the-hedgerow
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| It's getting steamy in the hedgerow | It's getting steamy in the hedgerow |
| (4 months later) | |
| Cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, Jack-in-the-pulpit – these names are medieval nudges and winks about genitalia and sex. They belong to wild arum, a trick flower that jumps out of the earth with a bawdy country humour that mocks the righteous and revels instead in the rude phwoar! of April. The cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, and maybe we’ll pay for these few glorious sunny days, but we’ll make the most of them until then. | Cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, Jack-in-the-pulpit – these names are medieval nudges and winks about genitalia and sex. They belong to wild arum, a trick flower that jumps out of the earth with a bawdy country humour that mocks the righteous and revels instead in the rude phwoar! of April. The cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, and maybe we’ll pay for these few glorious sunny days, but we’ll make the most of them until then. |
| It’s getting steamy in the hedgerow. For months, trees stood in companionable silence throughout a blowy winter that leaked into a dour early spring; now they fizz with a green static as buds pop and a million leaves inflate. Hawthorns push their little cheesy shuttlecocks, oaks are in their bronze; blackthorn has been snowing for weeks, and the purple dangles of ash are out. Small birds, skirmishing through disputed branches, travel in song between trees in the neutral air. | It’s getting steamy in the hedgerow. For months, trees stood in companionable silence throughout a blowy winter that leaked into a dour early spring; now they fizz with a green static as buds pop and a million leaves inflate. Hawthorns push their little cheesy shuttlecocks, oaks are in their bronze; blackthorn has been snowing for weeks, and the purple dangles of ash are out. Small birds, skirmishing through disputed branches, travel in song between trees in the neutral air. |
| Still for so long, life bursts everywhere. Two treecreepers spiral adjacent sallows in a double helix. A pair of chiffchaffs uses the wire fence between wood and field to perch on before darting, like children forbidden to cross a line, to snatch creatures from the grass. The wren of woebetide flies from brambles across the path, letting out a burst of song loaded with omens before vanishing again. A bird of augury, it belongs to an old imagination that seeks the secrets hiding in all life. | Still for so long, life bursts everywhere. Two treecreepers spiral adjacent sallows in a double helix. A pair of chiffchaffs uses the wire fence between wood and field to perch on before darting, like children forbidden to cross a line, to snatch creatures from the grass. The wren of woebetide flies from brambles across the path, letting out a burst of song loaded with omens before vanishing again. A bird of augury, it belongs to an old imagination that seeks the secrets hiding in all life. |
| The sawn stump of a storm-felled tree gathers bees to the warmth of its honey-scented timber. Deer move through the new shadows except one, perhaps shot and wounded by a poacher it faded before it could leap the fence to sanctuary and now lies dismantled by scavengers. | The sawn stump of a storm-felled tree gathers bees to the warmth of its honey-scented timber. Deer move through the new shadows except one, perhaps shot and wounded by a poacher it faded before it could leap the fence to sanctuary and now lies dismantled by scavengers. |
| The green of dog’s mercury and wild garlic fills the eye grown dim with wintry grey. All the violets, wood anemones, primroses, bluebells and celandines spangle a myopia blinking in unfamiliar sunshine. This naughty dance spring does with lords, ladies, cuckoos and Jacks: it can’t be undone whatever the weather. | The green of dog’s mercury and wild garlic fills the eye grown dim with wintry grey. All the violets, wood anemones, primroses, bluebells and celandines spangle a myopia blinking in unfamiliar sunshine. This naughty dance spring does with lords, ladies, cuckoos and Jacks: it can’t be undone whatever the weather. |
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