The flowers I love most on Exmoor in March are the primrose and the snowdrop.
Primroses and snowdrops are easy to spot as I travel through the narrow lanes of West Somerset and North Devon because they tend to clump together.
Primroses are a wonderful yellow colour with bright green leaves and are to be found growing in the high hedges which are a feature of the countryside around here. Snowdrops too love the hedgerows and have white bright bell shaped flowers that threaten to tinkle in the sun.
Snowdrops are so widespread in one valley near Wheddon Cross in Exmoor that the valley where they are in such glorious profusion has been aptly named Snowdrop Valley and it is a popular tourist destination with special coach trips laid on during the season.
But why do these humble little flowers, the primrose and the snowdrop, have such great appeal? After all, there are such a huge range of cultured flowers available these days in all sorts of colours, shapes and varieties. Global travel and low prices have brought an incredible variety of flowers into everyone’s gardens from all around the world and the horticulturists have cross bred and created many new ones.
For me, the appeal of the primrose and the snowdrop is in their wild, natural and unaffected simplicity. In the rural hedgerow, they exist largely by accident. Despite hedges being cut and trimmed with ruthless efficiency by enormous tools attached to large tractors, they pop up again and again each year. Cars, buses and lorries belch acrid fumes into the air around them yet they still survive. Little girls, as they always have done, make chains from the primroses to hang round their necks and make themselves even more pretty, sometimes they take some home to mum in a bouquet. Yet primroses welcome this treatment by coming back next year.
Just as the primroses and snowdrops come back each year, so do I, responding to the call of the countryside, which takes me up through the quiet winding lanes onto the moors with renewed affection each spring.
Bye for now
Rob
