Bluebells
Some might say my family and I moved to the north of England at the worst of all possible times. Actually, people did say that. Our plane touched down in Manchester on the first of November. It was already dark when we exited the airport, and we watched early Bonfire Night fireworks lighting up the horizon on the drive across the Pennines. So we arrived after the autumn glory, just as winter was settling in, a winter often wrapped in fog, snow, and whistling wind blowing between the buildings on our street. I quickly discovered that we didn’t have the right winter gear for this new life.
As the winter months inched toward spring, I noticed the people around me keeping time with the season by the flowers that slowly appeared, and they taught me to do the same. In February I saw my first snowdrop. By March the crocuses were popping up all golden and purple. The daffodils arrived in April, and the golden rapeseed fields were glowing in the sun by May. June brought buttercups and wild garlic, along with primroses in the hedges. I became so in tune with the rhythm of the flowers during my three years in North Yorkshire. But somehow, during that first spring, I missed out on hearing about the bluebells.
They first show up in my pictures in May during my first spring, taken on a walk around Fountains Abbey, but I didn’t have an English friend with me at the time to explain their significance, how they return each year and usually indicate an ancient woodland. By my second and third springs in North Yorkshire I knew to look out for them when I walked on the walls in York. There was always a bright blue patch of them visible below the wall, behind the Minster. On one of my favorite drives on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, I had to stop and pull the car over because my eye caught a glimpse of what Ronald Blythe calls their “psychedelic blueness.”
“...the bluebells at Tiger Hill—maybe a million of them. We all paid court to them, treading slippery paths, intoxicated by their strangely beautiful scent, awed by their psychedelic blueness. Are there words for it?”
I discovered Ronald Blythe’s beautiful seasonal essays while living in France, and they were such sweet reminders of English springs. My first spring in Paris I had to content myself with rare daffodil sightings in public parks, but then my family and I moved just outside the city to a place surrounded by ancient woodlands of its own. I discovered a woodland full of snowdrops amidst the trees of Versailles, and one week before we moved back to the States, on an evening walk in the Forêt de Marly, my husband and I happened upon all the bluebells I could ever wish to see. Quelle surprise!
My husband ordered some bluebell bulbs and planted them during our first autumn in our new house in Alabama. I haven’t seen any psychedelic blue yet, but I read they can take years before they flower. Here’s hoping.