The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (20 page)

This sense of wild creatures wandering at will through the world, in a way mere humans never can, was captured by Ted Hughes in a poem called ‘October Salmon’, where Hughes looks at a dying salmon which has come home to spawn and expire in its Devon river after its journey to the seas off Greenland. ‘So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!’ Hughes writes, and indeed, the five BTO cuckoos had roamed their own gallery of marvels, with the remarkable advantage, to us, that we could follow them doing so (and the project continues today).

I found all of it inspirational. I watched their wanderings with amazement. But nothing in it, nothing, compared to the moment when I suddenly saw that they were returning, the bearers of the two-note call, the perfect musical interval, which would ring out over the English countryside and proclaim indisputably that the new season was here; when I saw that the great eternal cycle had started again. I know it was the most extraordinary signal of the reawakening world that I will ever witness, and the sheer joy of it remains: it was like the joy of the winter solstice, the first snowdrops, and the first brimstone, all rolled into one, that day in February when, sitting at my computer screen, I saw the spring coming, four thousand miles away in the heart of central Africa.

•

There is one more marker of the reawakening earth which has given me joy, and that is blossom. It is a curious and charming peculiarity of English that it has a special word for the flowers of trees – other languages don’t, they simply call them tree-flowers, they say
les arbres en fleurs
or
die Baumblüte
– and this echoes the inchoate feeling I had for years that there was something in the nature of blossom which was special in itself. If I saw a blossoming cherry tree in a bed of flowering daffodils, eye-catching though both might be, I would be more animated by the white blossoms above than by the yellow flowers beneath.

Yes. I would.

Why should that be?

I used to think it was because blossom, especially on fruit trees such as apples, cherries, and plums, tends to appear in clusters, globular and luxurious, like the clumps of fruit they will turn into, and in their lush opulence these seem to be the very essence of the floral. But now I think the attraction is
simpler and deeper, it is a temporal one: there are flowers all the year round, but there are flowers on trees, generally speaking, only in springtime.

So blossom is of its very nature a banner, a bright banner with spring written on it, waving in the wind, and over the years I have developed in my mind a blossom calendar of my own, with its own special occasions eagerly awaited. You can kick off such an almanac right at the start of the year with some rarefied species such as winter-flowering cherry, but for me it begins in early March, with a foreign one, transplanted to England: magnolia, the tree of enormous, blowsy blooms. In my corner of the world, suburban west London, magnolias flourish in front gardens; on my commuter’s morning trudge from door to station I used to pass several of them, and as February ran its course it was impossible to ignore their great buds, erect, fleshy and tumescent, swelling until they were as fat as light bulbs. It was like watching fizzing fireworks ready to explode, until eventually,
Bang!
, they did, and suddenly before somebody’s front window was a smooth bare tree covered in waterlilies.

Magnolia bud-burst is pretty regular, and for years I noted the date for a spectacular white example at the bottom of my road, now sadly no more: it averaged 9 March, and it always brought forth a punching of the air from me, a
Yes!
like the first glimpse of the boxing hares. Joy in the first flowering tree. The world was unquestionably turning. It was a stunning as well as an uplifting sight, for whether white or cream or pink or yellow, magnolia blossoms are exuberant and tropical things, seeming far too exotic to be English, and of course they aren’t: their natural home is split between two far more glamorous parts of the world, in botanical terms, Asia and Central America (including the southern United States). But the intrepid efforts of plant collectors over the last two centuries have brought many of the two-hundred-odd species back to Britain, where,
especially in London (and in Kew Gardens in particular), they have flourished.

Their lavish flowering at what is usually a chilly and inhospitable time, while the surrounding trees are wondering hesitantly whether to put out a leaf or two, is one of the reasons why magnolias are so eye-catching here, such a source of pleasure. Another is that in the urban context, where I tend to see them, their bold brightness shows them off particularly well against brick or stucco. But perhaps the reason why they are special anywhere is the structure of the blossoms, which are not only whacking great things – like white doves nesting in the tree, a keen gardener friend once said to me – but appear uncomplicated: like the tree itself, they have simple, clean lines. In style terms, they’re minimalist.

This is no doubt because magnolias are among the most ancient and primitive of all the flowering plants (like the water-lilies their blossoms superficially resemble); they give us a hint of what flowering plants might have looked like when they first developed from conifers around one hundred and fifty million years ago. If you look at a magnolia bud, it looks very like a closed pine cone; you might say a magnolia flower is what an open pine cone became, once it had evolved colour and nectar to attract the winged insects to pollinate it, which were evolving at the same time . . . yet I am cheating, really, writing about this. I am concerned with the natural world, and this is verging on the horticultural. As magnolia is non-native, you will struggle to find it in much of Britain (although there are four national magnolia collections); it’s just that it’s been such a significant part of my own experience of spring blossom, I was reluctant to leave it out.

The next item on my blossom calendar, however, is spread across the country, and this is blackthorn. A member of the Prunus family, the stone fruit – the plums, the cherries, the peaches, and the almonds – its scientific name is
Prunus spinosa
,
or the thorny plum, and it produces sloes, those small black plums which are mouth-puckeringly astringent until the frosts get at them in October. Then they sweeten and can be used to make sloe gin, one of Britain’s great native drinks, out-topping even the fruit
eaux de vie
of France. Sensational stuff. Don’t get me started on it. Another benefit of the blackthorn is its wood, which makes prized walking-sticks – in Ireland it was traditionally used to make the shillelagh, the fighting club – and a third is that its leaves provide the larval food for two of Britain’s less common butterflies, the black and brown hairstreaks. The black hairstreak’s a bit dull, to be honest, but the female brown hair-streak is one of our loveliest insects, with glowing golden bands across her brown forewings, and you can only see her when she descends from the treetops in late August and September to lay her eggs on blackthorn twigs. One of my most prized possessions is a painting of a female brown hairstreak next to a bunch of ripening sloes by Richard Lewington, insect artist supreme: autumn glory, I think when I look at it.

But spring glory, even more, is what the blackthorn furnishes. When the bush flowers, usually in mid to late March, it looks as if it is covered in hoar-frost rather than weighed down with fat hanging blossoms in cherry-tree style; it looks like trees do on those mid-winter mornings when you wake after a night of freezing fog and every black branch seems to have been dusted with sugar. The reason is that the flowers on the black-thorn appear before the leaves, so the whole arrangement is more spindly and delicate, skinny bare branches that seem to have been sprayed with white. Skinny or not, they transform the landscape. Blackthorn hedges are widely planted and in the monochrome countryside of March and early April they provide the first substantial burst of colour: a month before the greening comes, there is a whitening of the world. I once drove in early spring from Brighton to London, and the A23 was bordered with blossoming blackthorn for mile after mile: every few yards,
for ten miles, twenty miles, thirty miles through the Sussex countryside, there seemed to be a blackthorn bush dressed from head to foot in white, and I wondered how many of the drivers pelting along the dual carriageway were appreciating its spectacularly ornamented flanks. Eventually I found a blackthorn-fringed lay-by, pulled in, and greedily broke off two of the blossoming twigs and drank deep of their honey scent. They travelled with me on the dashboard all the way home, thorn branches frosted in numberless small white petals. I loved them. I love them every year.

After the blackthorn, in April, the blossom marked in my calendar comes thick and fast. In the small garden of our house we are blessed with an apple tree (a Bramley seedling), a true cherry, and a lilac, and in most years we tend to have a few days when all three are out together, decorating the garden extravagantly in pink and white, pure white, and pale lavender-blue. At such times, drawing back the curtain of my daughter’s bedroom window causes a sharp intake of breath as the apple blossom is right outside and fills the whole window pane; while in the streets around us, the horse chestnuts, their new leaves an iridescent emerald, top off their transitory magnificence with the biggest blossoms of all, the white roman candles, bulky as pineapples. And then one more before the calendar closes: the hawthorn, or the May blossom, named after its month, rich and luxuriant in its hedgerows – cream to the blackthorn’s sugar.

All of these are beautiful, but it is not just their beauty which so strongly affects me, it is that they are markers of the turning year: the very act of setting eyes on blossom locates you in the springtime, and I think our bond with nature is very obvious in the power of the natural calendar and its events to move us to joy, in the fact that the annual rebirth of the natural world is not a matter of indifference; or at least, it is not to me, and I know it is not for many people. On occasions, it has moved me to a joy so intense that I have been at a loss as to how to respond.

One such experience took place in France. For ten years, my wife and I and our two children spent many of our holidays in an old farmhouse in southern Normandy, in the rolling, wooded hills of the Perche, the ancient medieval county which is home to the Percheron great horse, and which is bypassed by most British tourists. One of the house’s attractions was its large garden, which held many songbirds with spotted flycatchers the most thrilling visitor, as well as constant swooping swallows and linnets and yellowhammers singing on the telephone wire, plus the odd mammalian surprise: red squirrels came in from time to time from the wood across the road, and once my wife saw the snaking shape of
la fouine
, the stone marten. But for me perhaps the most significant attraction was a profusion of insects now but a distant memory in insect-impoverished Britain: the butterflies were splendid, from swallowtails to fritillaries, and at night the moths were magnificent, as I know since I took my moth trap there, unashamed nerd that I am. Among a great moth menagerie there were Jersey tigers and crimson under-wings and several different species of hawk moth, not least the privet hawk moth – big as a bomber, or so it seemed when I first set astonished eyes upon it – as well as the angle shades and the buff arches and the setaceous Hebrew character and the large yellow underwing and all sorts of other stuff, and there was much more than Lepidoptera. Sometimes we would be visited by the bulkiest of all the bees, the violet carpenter bee, navy blue and the size of a cocktail sausage; and when dusk arrived, the children would be entranced by the tiny points of luminous green radiance in the grass, as the female glow-worms lit up their lamps for passing males.

The rear half of the garden was given over to a small old orchard of fourteen different fruit trees, with apples and cherries and peaches and several varieties of plum, including damson,
quetsche
in French, and greengage, which is
reine-claude
, and
mirabelle
, which is the same in both languages and which, if you
get it at the right moment, is the acme of all fruits. It is small and round and greenish-yellow as it slowly ripens and then it tastes perfectly pleasant, with what one might call a generalised plum taste; but right at the end of its ripening, in the day or two before it drops off the tree, its skin colour deepens to old gold with red spots and then, ah then, its taste is like nothing you have experienced, the most subtle sideways variation on sweetness your palate will ever be blessed with.

But the orchard held other blessings. In springtime the blossom was spectacular, especially on a couple of the pure white cherries, which seemed, like the Easter trees in A. E. Housman’s matchless lyric (‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’) to be ‘hung with snow’. And there was yet a further blossoming too, and that was the birdsong.

For some years I have thought of spring birdsong as blossom in sound. This takes us I suppose into the realms of synaesthesia, the interpreting or experiencing of one sense via another, not a concept I have ever found particularly rewarding or fruitful, despite its promotion by numerous prominent figures in the arts; but once the suggestion flowed into my mind, listening to willow warblers singing on Skye, their silvery falling cadence softening the severity of the northern landscape as much as flowering trees might do, it would not leave. In the orchard in France the bird-song was fulsome: we woke every morning to a chorus of blackbirds and song thrushes, robins, wrens, and chaffinches, and best of all a blackcap, with the most mellifluous, melodious song you can imagine, and I began to think of this as blossom, as much as the blossom was blossom; and then, in the most extraordinary experience – at least, it was for me – they merged into one.

For one late April the blackcap was singing unseen, deep in a hedge, and it was joy-inspiring; and across the garden was the most gloriously flowering of the cherry trees, and that was joy-inspiring too. Then on a Sunday morning – I remember it precisely – the bird moved into the tree and began its song.