RHAPSODY IN BLUE

BLUEBELLS IN BLOOM. BRITAIN’S WOODLANDS WELCOME SPRING BY ROLLING OUT AN ASTOUNDING –AND ALMOST UNIQUE – BLUE CARPET

- Mike Dilger

Producing one of the greatest wildflower shows on Earth, the bluebell has many fans. Indeed, it came as no surprise when the bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) was named Britain’s favourite flower in a 2002 poll that was part of Plantlife’s County Flowers project. The plant’s stupendously synchronous showing has been celebrated for a lot longer than a couple of decades, though – its blooms figure prominently in the poems of John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose writings date back to Victorian times. And if the violet-blue haze created by a carpet of these nodding flowers isn’t enough to convert even the most reluctant of wordsmiths into a budding poet, then perhaps nothing is.

The show put on by this most recognisable of woodland flowers is also a uniquely British phenomenon. With the species unable to tolerate either the hard winters of northern and central Europe, or the hot, dry summers of southern Europe, our crowded islands probably hold more bluebells than the rest of the world put together. And like all the best spectacles, the ephemeral nature of the display will always leave you feeling a touch bereft when it finally fades from view.

It is, of course, the bluebells’ leaves that emerge first, well before the trees and shrubs above them have even broken bud (thereby ensuring an early sheet of dark green leaves before the main event a few weeks later).