Dressed all in white

As attractive to artists as it is to moths and butterflies, the ‘White Period’ of heavenly spring blossom is upon us and John Lewis-Stempel couldn’t be happier

- John Lewis-Stempel

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide… From ‘Loveliest of Trees’ by A. E. Housman

IN wood and orchard, along the hedge and on mountains, the trees of spring are in blossom. Such a word, blossom. Plants, down on the ground, merely bloom, but trees blossom, the sibilance suggestive of spring’s fizzing energy after leaden dull winter. Rowan. Wild cherry. Blackthorn. Crab apple. Hawthorn. Wild pear. Wild service tree. All of them brilliant white in their flowering, like wedding gowns and confirmation dresses for Eastertide.

The lightened days of spring touch the trees’ blossom into white—or is it the other way around, the blossom lightening the spring days? Whichever. It is light on light. We are in the White Period, those glorious weeks beginning with the blackthorn blossom in early March and ending with hawthorn, Shakespeare’s ‘darling buds’, in May. When Britain looks pretty in white, from the rowan clinging to the Highland slope to the crab apple lazing in a Herefordshire hedge. When walks along the evening lane are enchanted by fountains of phosphorescent hawthorn when a morning window at school frames blackthorn crystals on bare branches against blue skies and when an afternoon traffic jam in London’s Highbury is bettered by eyeing a single flowering cherry tree in the front garden of No 48.

Blossom uplifts the hearts of even the weary, whether they be pensioners with sticks returning from the suburban post office or teenage hill-climbers scrambling up Pen y Fan. As Shakespeare, a plant and tree man to his core phrased it in Sonnet 98: ‘From you have I been absent in the spring,/When proud pied April, dress’d in all his trim,/Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing…’