Scalloped splashes of gold

Lauded by Wordsworth for their ‘glittering countenance’, the appearance of the first celandines and the swallow’s return to our shores are c favourite, and much anticipated, harbingers of spring

- Ian Morton's

THE nation waits—when will the first swallows be sighted? Records kept since Victorian times indicate March as the most likely month, although the migrants often arrive earlier. Hampshire naturalist and diarist Gilbert White noted in his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (first published in 1789 and never out of print since) that ‘the House Swallow... appears in general on or about the 13th of April... now and then a straggler is seen much earlier’. In 2018 and 2019, sightings in the south of the country were reported during unusually warm spells in early February. Rural tradition held February 21 to be the date when the bird should arrive, but the swallow was not alone in greeting the new season of growth, for on that day, too, the lesser celandine was expected to bloom. Here was no coincidence. Celandine is an anglicised form of chelidon, the Greek for swallow. From distant days past, bird and plant were twin harbingers of spring—and they still are.

Never mind the host of golden daffodils that flash upon the inward eye, William Wordsworth actually preferred the celandine. ‘There’s a flower that shall be mine, ’tis the little celandine,’ he wrote in one of three poems he devoted to the modest, ground-hugging plant. The spread of pointed petals and its ‘glittering countenance’ would have inspired painters who sought to depict the sunrise, he suggested. Perhaps he knew that the Celts called the plant crian, their word for the sun. Indeed, Wordsworth loved the lesser celandine so much that he asked for it to be engraved on his tombstone in St Oswald’s churchyard, Grasmere. A celandine duly appears on his memorial plaque in the church, but, oh dear—unwittingly, the artist chose the wrong celandine.