See the blackthorn swim in snow

Bedecked with thorns so spiky it’s known as Nature’s barbed wire, the blackthorn’s delicate, starry-white flowers are also an often unreliable harbinger of spring, observes Jack Watkins

- Jack Watkins

ON drab days at the end of a long, cold winter, we become hedgerow detectives. The search is on for buds that are thickening and leaflets that are opening, clues that brighter, warmer, more colourful times lie ahead. The true change of the seasons can be a long time coming, however. Spring has many illusory dawns. A few days of genial sunshine, a mild westerly and joyful birdsong are ended abruptly by the return of the chill, the north wind whipping round to silence our avian friends once more. Yet nothing lulls the unprepared into a falser sense of hope than the blackthorn.

Its March flowering, coming slightly ahead of its leaves, is undoubtedly a striking spectacle. The starry, white-petalled inflorescence lights up the lanes and hedgerows and jumps out from the edge of a dark wood. What is curious is that this creamy abundance pays no heed to temperature. In fact, it has been observed that the flowering often coincides with, or precedes, a cold spell. Over the centuries, superstitious rural folk have blamed the innocent species for ushering in the bitter plunge in temperatures, hence the term blackthorn winter.