Cow Parsley Rampant

 

Two shots of the Great Graveyard  with gravestones
peeping out from, or totally hidden by.
Cow Parsley Rampant.

I am starting to taper off my self-imposed house arrest as I await the return of a fugitive energy and for the last two mornings I have done part of what was my usual early morning walk in the Abbey Gardens. I was amazed at the extraordinary growth of the ubiquitous cow parsley during my modest absence. It is particularly impressive in much of the Great Graveyard where ancient headstones are either totally submerged in the rampant white and green glory, or simply craning their necks to show the tips of their memorials. It is actually a glorious sight, relatively short-lived but concentrated and almost giddy in its display!! I meet few walkers, mainly with their dogs, but almost everyone this morning, for example, made some joyful comment on the plethora of white bobbing floral heads. Even an ebullient mood can shift up a gear apparently when witnessing a minor floral miracle!!

More pleasing colours in the fabled Abbey Gardens.

The chestnut and the lilac, the latter 
rather paler in this photo.

The other touch of Nature I noticed this morning was as I returned towards the North exit to the gardens, leading to Angel Hill. A tall chestnut tree is in abundant flower and to its left, a dark purple lilac. I was suddenly and irresistibly reminded of a poem I used when I trained a speech choir in a secondary school, for some local cultural competition, about sixty years ago. I could remember brief snatches but when I consulted Google, I was amazed at the sheer length and breadth of the poem, by Alfred Noyes, none of which I could recall! Here is the appropriate extract from what appears to be a hundred other stanzas!

                                     For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard

 At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!

               

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Fine bone china mug with lilac design. £14.

                                 And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out

                                      You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London: --

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

The human memory is a thing of wonder even in old age when it is less efficient, to put it kindly. I do not know how it is that I have such a strong memory of a small portion of what is a long, long poem, though I do bow to the wisdom of Marcel Proust who wrote, among many, many bons mots: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” The tiny extract I have recalled obviously appealed to me perhaps both because of the strong images and also because of the insistent rhythm. Perhaps the fact, that only now I recall, is that my choir, from a lowly-rated secondary modern school with absolutely no history of experience, much less success, in Performance, won its particular niche verse-speaking competition which must have rewarded us for the unduly long, frequent and much-resented rehearsals! A result which, I now recall, also delighted the Head and caused  a very  brief moment in the sun for me. Now, there’s an echo from another time, another place and all courtesy of two trees in annual Spring-time bloom in Bury's Abbey Gardens.

The complexity of memory

                                  Strangely, perhaps in instinctive celebration, I feel a haiku coming on:

                                                               Cow blossom dances/

                                                        Ancient graves recall echoes/

                                                                  Of faded voices.

Faded voices

                                                          

N.B. Haiku is an old Japanese poetic form, conveying a strict syllabic, three line picture or emotion.  [5/7/5]The object for the writer is to convey multum in parvo. Much in little, but implying a richness beyond the strict limits of the form.

 

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