The flower that deserves to blow its own trumpet

We may have broken the bounds of earth to land men on the moon; defied gravity with our incredibly heavy flying machines and invented a plethora of technology to do just about every manual task but we still can’t drive in the snow!

Yet again when the white stuff was dumped on this little rock in incredible amounts, life, as we know it ground to a halt.

Having watched the classic thirties’ Hollywood adaptation of Wuthering Heights the previous Thursday evening, as I struggled to strengthen a fence at risk of being blown over by the Force Nine winds, I would not have been at all surprised if the spirits of Emily Brontë’s doomed lovers had passed by.

To quote Boris Becker ‘Nobody died’ – in fact a baby was born! That no one made their way to heaven via a snowdrift or under a falling tree was a miracle considering how inadequately many were dressed as they struggled home on foot.

True to form, many owners of fashionista four by fours (FFFs) proved that all those hi-tech features that make such obscenely expensive vehicles ideal for the conditions were wasted on them. Having failed to master the rudimentary driving skill of reversing – and as their annoying habit of driving in the middle of the road became impossible – they were lost in more than one sense of the word.

The FFF may have been designed to ford raging rivers, climb impossibly steep gradients and safely traverse terrain resembling the dark side of the moon, but you don’t come across much of that on the school run. Just like a wild beast in a zoo, doomed to pace the same ground when their instinct tells them they should be roaming the veldt, whenever I encounter a FFF on Island roads – no matter what the weather – the words ‘wasted potential’ and ‘more money than sense’ spring to mind.

The weekend before the blizzard, the Island had basked in true spring weather; warm, sunny and under clear blue skies. It was time to admire the hardy daffodil and never more so than this year when the early blossom is long overdue as every plant, vegetable and fruit suffers from the terrible wet weather that has blighted our isles since last summer.

Snowdrops bring hope that spring is not far away and crocuses are welcome explosions of bright colours, but it is the glorious yellow trumpet of the daffodil that heralds the awakening of nature.

And what a survivor it is. No matter what Mother Nature throws at us as winter turns into spring, the daffodil comes through relatively unscathed albeit a tad battered around the edges.

Having enjoyed the splendid sight of hundreds of the flowers in bloom beneath the trees in the small wood at the bottom of my garden pre-blizzard, my heart sank to see them seemingly squashed by a thick heavy blanket of deep snow. Yet, as the thaw gradually melted the snow, to soak the ground as effectively as a heavy cloudburst, one by one those tough yellow trumpets slowly but surely rose again.

They might not stand as tall and straight as usual but their resilience is a fine example to us all. If a simple flower can take all that is thrown at it and still keep going, then who are we to bleat and moan when things don’t go our way?

It was the pleasing sight of my garden more or less restored to its spring beauty of wild flowers and buds impatient to open, that got me thinking of William Wordworth’s poetic tribute to the daffodil, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. The word ‘cloud’ may have taken on a new meaning in the indecipherable language used by those who inhabit the foreign country of computer services, but its true meaning is not yet completely lost.

The words composed by Wordworth may be more than 200 years old, but still convey the sheer delight of seeing daffodils, dancing as is their want in the breeze, for the first time of the year. As he wrote: ‘I gazed – and gazed – but little thought; ?what wealth the show to me had brought’.

The beauty of the daffodil for children used to be that it came free, to be picked from hedgerows for mums and grannies on Mother’s Day and at Easter.

If children attempt that now they risk being ticked off by those irate adults and officers of the law who have obviously forgotten the joys of childhood past. In the pre-computer when children were free to play outside as the days lengthened, if they came home late, and dirty from tip to toe, a bunch of nature’s free bounty would usually placate a mother ready to send them to bed without tea!

The power of Wordsworth’s composition, engrained on the national psyche, draw tens of thousands to his old home, Dove Cottage, in the Lake District every year, where among the memorabilia on sale is a kit to ‘knit your own Dove Cottage.

I wonder what the great man would think of that? Like me, I’d think he’d say: ‘give me a bunch of daffs any day’ and preferable picked from the wild – ‘then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.’

With Holy Week almost upon us, Happy Easter.

Paula Thelwell