Green spirits awakening in May

The green alkanet is in flower along the hedge that catches the morning light and gives shelter from the rain. May brings green fire: a lyrical contagion. Thickset, coarse and bristly, green alkanet has the feel of an outsider, pitching up on boundary land, putting down its stubborn roots, which, once, were used to make red dye.

Green or evergreen alkanet, so called because it will flower into winter, jumped the garden fence back in the 1720s to join the ergasiophygophytes - botanical escapees from captivity making a bid for freedom.

What this wayside weed lacks in elegance – an overrated quality in my view – it makes up for in the brilliance of its blue flowers.

The alkanet is part of a flowering pulse like an emergency blue light of bluebells, violets and ground ivy, flashing between the pulses of yellow, from the celandines, daffodils and cowslips, and the great white pulse of wild garlic, cow parsley and hawthorn.

When I first saw the alkanet flowers their startling blue mirrored the intensity of the sky. It was not to last when the green woodpecker spoke of rain. Now small tortoiseshell and speckled wood butterflies jostled in the drizzle for territory. Blackbirds and thrushes used the damp chambered air to float songs.

Inside the woods, lawns of wild garlic were ready to explode into flower and a wet emerald glowed from earth to treetop as birds sang with the sonic equivalent of bud burst.

At the other side of the woods, where the view opens in giddy vertigo across the Welsh Marches, there was drama in the sky. A pair of ravens attacked a buzzard. The fracas looked more dangerous than usual. The ravens pealed off as a second buzzard appeared and the two raptors circled in silence.

Then, the unmistakable form of a peregrine falcon, and, for a moment, a triangle of powerful birds in the sky above the Edge. The encounter was thrilling, symbolising the animate spirit of the landscape. Into this “green rain” as Mary Webb described it, swallows came skimming low over the meadow, out of the blue.

Paul Evans @DrPaulEvans1