England Part IX - Springtime

Spring is a lovely season, especially the way it appears in the English countryside.
When I was little, I went every Easter with my parents and cousins to the the primrose woods at the end of the village to pick primroses. Each bunch of primroses was circled with primrose leaves before being secured with an elastic band and carefully placed in my mother's basket.

English Primrose - primula vulgaris

Some of the primroses would go to the local church for Easter decorations, and can you believe my mother would pack some of the primrose posies carefully into a sturdy box and send them by train to uncles and aunts in other parts of the country so they could experience the fragrance of our Devon primroses? And they would arrive at their destination the same day, just as fresh as when they left the woods. I don't think that could happen nowadays.

Baaaaa - where's the mint sauce?

The steep slopes of the Devon cliffs are covered with golden gorse flowers, or furze, as my dad called it. Gorse is in flower most of the year, giving rise to the old country saying "When gorse is out of blossom, kissing's out of fashion". Apparently, gorse flowers are edible, but I've never tasted them. If you want to try them, be careful....gorse has spiky thorns and can do you a lot of damage.

Common Gorse - ulex europaeus

The lovely blackthorn paints the hedgerows white in April. The flowers bloom before the leaves appear in the early spring. But this shrub has spines too, very sharp ones.

Blackthorn - prunus spinosa

The blackthorn is a relation of the plum tree and produces small bitter sloes in the fall. Edible, but you wouldn't want to! Better to brew up sloe gin instead.

For more about my trip to England, please scroll down to previous posts.