Spring Green

Revenants, dragon’s teeth – the earth is haunted by spring flowers. Each January, as if in green recreations of that scene from Carrie, fingers thrust out of the ground.

My attitude to flowers is not often soft and accommodating. I’m colour blind to that part of the spectrum in which many bloom, and plagued by the itches of hay fever, so much of their charm can pass me by. Most of the time I appreciate the invertebrate life they attract much more than the plants themselves: the angular shield bug, the never-stalling bees, the mild brown snails that hide under curled leaves.

But even for me the arrival of flowers represents a brightening of the world – the shift from the freeze (or floods) of winter to the clarity of early spring. Still, I remain contrary, as it’s the preparation for, not the emergence of flowers that interests me.

This emergence probably used to start in the new year, but the milder winters of some recent years have meant that mid-December brings the first signs. The ground is prickled suddenly with sprouting tips.

It seems a sudden event, but reason insists that these points of tissue proud of the soil must have been visible for days, even weeks before I spotted them under a beech just off the road into town. I always mean next year to look harder, catch them in the process of coming up. I never do.

In GCSE Biology years ago I learned that movement is a characteristic of all living things. That of plants movement is usually imperceptible to quick animal eyes, including that resulting from growth. It seems to me as though the shoots simply are different each time I see them, with no intermediate heights (though of course each of my sightings is always of an intermediate stage between another person’s two sightings). Eventually the buds appear, and that stem’s particular shade of green is topped by the coming flower; already it is becoming secondary, a strut that supports.

The engineering of stems is amazing. They blow in the wind, having pushed through sometimes frozen earth. They bear the weight of the flower (and its attendant insects, and any moisture) through much the worst weather of late winter and early spring. Their tissues resist the cold, continuing to transfer nutrients to the flowerhead above. Each species’ stem has a different shape, but all perform similar functions. Complexity and simplicity of construction coexist in them.

The sources of the stems (and the leaves and flowers) of the most common spring flowers remain invisible at this time of year, but I see them continually when I dig through the claggy mud that makes our garden. Bulbs are the dragon’s teeth – white, sharp-ended and irresistible in forcing out new growth. They sometime rattle on the spade.

Once in a while I try to arrange those I find into rows along a fence, but there are always more I don’t manage to pick out. The loose scattering of emergent tips in spring continues.

These white packages full of the coding and nutrition necessary for the flowering superstructure are built to survive. Those in our garden have put up with, even sprouted in, the freezes of recent years. If I accidentally slice one with my spade, the leaves still come. Those left on the surface, either by me or by our local grubbing fox, ignore the lack of soil and get on with growing.

I don’t know whether those sunk for weeks this year under our most recent floods will manage to bloom, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This resilience makes me think about how hard the human impact on wild species must be for them to be struggling so much (see The State of Nature).

In Oxfordshire the defining spring bloom is the snake’s head fritillary, “voted” (as they say) the county flower. Wild, they are restricted to a few flood meadows by the Thames (although I’ve seen cultivars in flowerbeds on the site of London Docks, where Joseph Conrad first arrived in England – now an impressively bland estate in Wapping). But we have one plant in our garden. Who knows how it got there.

I’ve written before about fritillaries’ lives, but their bulbs and seeds are built to endure the floods and frost of English winters by the Thames. As I write, it’s too early to tell whether our plant – or those of nearby Iffley Meadows will rise triumphantly in 2014. Even if they don’t, it would only be one year (two years, I suppose, as last year wasn’t too successful either) in the life of a species. As a water-loving plant, perhaps the fritillary will start to spread as the land subject to flooding becomes more moist – an overoptimistic view.

One of the uses to which I put my observations of variations in plants’ emergence is as a base for speculation on local conditions. For example, the daffodils in the grounds of the hotel up the road are always sprouting and in bloom before ours (and after those in Magdalen College Gardens). The hotel’s plants are closer to the road, further from the river and get more sun, which means that they are overall warmer than those under the trees at the back of our garden. A distance of less than ten minutes’ walk, and yet weeks of difference in the timing of biological events.

This local variation gives some hint about the complexity of the climate and the difficulty of creating a picture of what will happen where as it changes. If the changes were less unpredictable they would be more visible everywhere, and responding to them would be much easier. I am almost powerless to affect these changes. I just take note, and hope that this is worth doing.