Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

I believe very strongly in the principle of carpe diem or seize the day! My daughter and grandson have just been to visit and we had a great time. Not much domestic got done in those ten days. Oscar was having too much fun, playing on his first ever roundabout, putting Mr. Zebedee back to bed in his jack-in-a-box and letting the sand slip between his fingers on his first ever beach. Now the ironing is threatening to escape from the cupboard where I keep it imprisoned; there is a thick layer of dust over everything which is shown up right now by the glorious sunshine that keeps streaming in through the windows; the freezer is quite empty; I have writing to do; there are vegetables to plant out in the garden and ...

 

However! That glorious sunshine keeps on streaming in and spring has arrived! The local caravan parks are full of people ready for the Easter weekend that is approaching fast and the birds are singing in the treetops. A few lines of a much-loved poem keep turning over and over in my mind and I'm lost! Who cares about the housework? Who cares about the vegetables?

 

'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide'.

 

That got me thinking. All the cherry trees round here are pink, not white! Is this another variety? A.E. Houseman* seemed quite sure his were white, but he lived in Shropshire - perhaps that's different.

 

'And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.'

 

There he goes again - ours are hung with 'cherry pink', not snow. And Houseman seems to think he has fifty springs left to go out and see them; I'm not too sure I have that many left, so all the more reason to go.

 

All in all, I seemed to have plenty of excuse to leave the housework behind today and saunter out up a country lane in search of the cherry trees, which is just what I did this morning, not that I found a white cherry tree anywhere, but plenty of other compensations! Imagine a country lane, with neat green hedges, covered in fresh, new, bright spring growth, lambs bleating beside their mothers in the fields, chaffinches and robins singing in the trees and all along the hedgerows a procession of yellow celandine, pale yellow primroses, white, starry stitchwort, golden dandelions and a scattering of bluebells and red campion - too early really, but there nevertheless! Bliss! So, yet again, I'm leaving this achievement-orientated world behind in favour of the natural world which somehow calls to me time and time again and tempts me outside to revel in it. It's now the cherry tree is hung with bloom - next week won't do. Carpe Diem!

 

 

*A.E. Houseman, A Shropshire Lad