Guess what! It's been ten degrees, mild and balmy, and the flowers are blooming. Twice as many varieties of wild flower in bloom in England right now, we're told, as is usual for this time of year. I saw a stork investigating last year's nest the other day. Time to breed? Blackbirds are starting to chase each other around the garden, tuning up for the spring mating season. Crazy!
It's all wrong and at the first frost the flowers will die and be wasted, having to wait another whole year until they can perform their annual miracle and burst into bloom. But I'm finding it hard to be sorry. I would like it to be spring! Just when I thought we were condemned to grey skies, a cold, hard winter and January, February and March to get through before we can relax in the sunshine again, nature has decided differently. The bulbs are flourishing in the garden and the trees are in bud. I love it! I get so impatient at this time of year and find it hard to just sit myself down and wait patiently for it all to start happening again after the winter pause.
Patience doesn't seem to be our strong point anymore, does it? Why wait? Fruit and veg in the shops the whole year round, regardless of the proper season; strawberries in January; oranges in August! Already in the market they are selling daffodils; but outside my front door there is a pot of yellow chrysanthemums in their second flush of bloom! In Victorian times there was a fashion for painting still life displays of fruits and flowers, butterflies, insects and so on that were a logical impossibility to find together in the same season. It was a kind of trademark of the Victorian era in art. Not so now! We can have anything we want whenever we want it, it seems.
Is this a good idea? We have lost the art of anticipation and the capacity for waiting. We want it now! We want to buy the house of our dreams on a mortgage we can't afford to pay for; we want to start a business on credit, instead of saving the capital to invest first before we begin. We already know what the consequences are for that... Live now, pay later! Maybe the current economic crisis will turn things around a bit. If we start to 'grow our own' as is currently in vogue we may have to eat strawberries in June after all. But maybe, with climate change, we can have them all year round anyway. Who knows. Nothing is very certain these days...
Anyway, now finally the weather has turned, at least for a few days. Bright, cold sunshine and blue skies - a least a bit more like winter but the flowers are still hanging on. I wonder how long we can get away with it...
It's all wrong and at the first frost the flowers will die and be wasted, having to wait another whole year until they can perform their annual miracle and burst into bloom. But I'm finding it hard to be sorry. I would like it to be spring! Just when I thought we were condemned to grey skies, a cold, hard winter and January, February and March to get through before we can relax in the sunshine again, nature has decided differently. The bulbs are flourishing in the garden and the trees are in bud. I love it! I get so impatient at this time of year and find it hard to just sit myself down and wait patiently for it all to start happening again after the winter pause.
Patience doesn't seem to be our strong point anymore, does it? Why wait? Fruit and veg in the shops the whole year round, regardless of the proper season; strawberries in January; oranges in August! Already in the market they are selling daffodils; but outside my front door there is a pot of yellow chrysanthemums in their second flush of bloom! In Victorian times there was a fashion for painting still life displays of fruits and flowers, butterflies, insects and so on that were a logical impossibility to find together in the same season. It was a kind of trademark of the Victorian era in art. Not so now! We can have anything we want whenever we want it, it seems.
Is this a good idea? We have lost the art of anticipation and the capacity for waiting. We want it now! We want to buy the house of our dreams on a mortgage we can't afford to pay for; we want to start a business on credit, instead of saving the capital to invest first before we begin. We already know what the consequences are for that... Live now, pay later! Maybe the current economic crisis will turn things around a bit. If we start to 'grow our own' as is currently in vogue we may have to eat strawberries in June after all. But maybe, with climate change, we can have them all year round anyway. Who knows. Nothing is very certain these days...
Anyway, now finally the weather has turned, at least for a few days. Bright, cold sunshine and blue skies - a least a bit more like winter but the flowers are still hanging on. I wonder how long we can get away with it...
No comments:
Post a Comment