"Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May," wrote Tennyson. And in a short drive last weekend there were the white candles of the chestnut trees in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, and farther on Blackthorn and Hawthorn flowers; on the smaller roads the cow parsley brushed against the car as you drove, all white. Elder shrubs are just about to burst into white and, farther south, already have done so. Crab apples along the way. White clematis here and there and, at Castleknock a show of your ordinary daisy such as you haven't seen for years.
Later, on the River Borora, we'll have the streams, maybe 20 feet long, of ranunculus fluitans with its floating white flowers. The trees, the shrubs, the weeds all sing the song of spring-into-summer. "It's always like this," says a horticulturist friend, "in the middle of May." But he had to admit that the rain followed by the sun had made grass grow as never before. Grass paths that he mows weekly for one client had grown four inches, he swears, in one week. Spring-summer does lift you out of the glooms. One of the most heartening signs is a John Downie apple tree, a lovely elegant crab, which is not only covered with the most luxuriant flowering of its 20-year career, but seems to have grown generously.
When did you last nibble a pig-nut? Also known, according to Flora Britannica by Mabey, as ground-nut, cat-nut, earth-nut, earthchestnut. Our friend the horticulturist mentioned above has just brought in three plants which he got among the trees and has put them into a bed near the house. It is described as a modest-sized umbellifer with a fine thready foliage (white flower, of course); tastes raw, a bit like an unripe hazelnut. In the past, according to Mabey, when more plentiful, and probably bigger, they were cooked often with rabbit. Cooked, they have "the texture of, and milder taste than parsnips". More, on this blissful May day: at about four o'clock in the afternoon, there must have been a hatch of flies for, on a stretch of the Borora, a lively, slightly downhill gambol over a stony bottom, there was a sudden rise of trout. No rod to hand, of course. But it does the heart good to see that this water which suffered from an upstream fire and the resultant counter-measures, may be returning to its old form without restocking.
The only blot on the landscape: two surly mulberry trees. Hardly a leaf showing. There is an odd sentence in Edlin's book The Tree Key. "Once they were more highly esteemed, and this explains why mulberries are often found on the lawns of old country houses, particularly rectories." Can you work that out?