By Ida Bridgeman
I saw the first signs of spring one week, snow drops had opened. In the quiet of the early morning, glowing sky, and the river running strong with February rain, I walked past them on the banks – had they opened earlier? Had I not noticed? Some glimmer of hope and joy sparked inside of me, not that I wasn’t joyous before I saw them, but in that way your heart skips when you notice some small details of the beauty of the world. A Moldovan legend recalls a battle between Lady Spring and Winter Witch; Lady Spring pricked her finger and the snow beneath it melted and created a gentle snowdrop flower. This announced her reign over the world. People don’t plant snow drops in the way a rose garden is cultivated and shown off for the brightest colours, this is an unexpected and unprepared beauty. There are, of course, other flowers that bloom in winter but these are sturdy, and shrub like and dull the senses as we huddle down the path turning our face from wind and rain. These white drops form out of the scruff of a woodland floor and on road sides, they placed themselves into my sight at exactly the time they felt like it, prompted by some unknown feeling in the air that it was time for an introduction to spring.
It’s easy not to notice something has been absent until it appears again, a year after they were last here, so quiet and delicate aside the rushing of the river. The symbolism is blatant – new beginnings, hope, rebirth, perhaps the intricacy of creation and the delicacy of life. Plants have all sorts of funny meanings. Rosemary is for remembrance, buttercups can read your likes and dislikes and OH, the roses on Valentines. When did flowers become a symbol of love? Is it depressing that they die or a reminder of the fleeting nature of the everyday and the necessity to take in the colours and the scent whilst they are there? As for love, we look back to Greek mythology where the Goddess Aphrodite’s beauty was so great that red roses sprang up wherever she walked and became a symbol of love and desire, given in romantic gestures. 14 February involves less Greek Goddesses and more hopeful gents, on every turn of a Durham street, bouquet in hand ready to profess their admiration to their current sweetheart – same one as last year? Does it matter? Sorry, I’m not a sceptic of the validity of valentine’s love, I am merely pointing out the inevitability that each year, whilst the snow drops appearance is joyously unpredictable, the market square Tesco’s flower delivery on 13th Feb is reassuringly inevitable. Much like Xanthe’s ‘three different types of cookie dough spread’ found on one shelf before pancake day. (‘A MODERN DAY LENT’, published Feb 22)
There’s this desire in our human psyche to know, name and order everything. When I was young, my mother spent much of her gardening time returning to the house to quiz us on the colourful, sneeze inducing (ironic that a love of flowers is accompanied by hay fever) blossoms and buds. When we went away to school and university this game moved online until my brother discovered the ‘Picture This’ plant identifier app and the integrity of the quiz was at a loss. We were then expected to insert the appropriate ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and ‘how lovely’ at pictures of colourful plants. I hope we can still appreciate them as much without knowing the Latin conjugations of a tulip.
I’ve spent summers days happiest filling my hair with flowers and sliding one through a button hole of anyone around me that will stay still for a patient second, whilst Van Gogh painted his Irises in the Saint- Rémy psychiatric hospital as an outlet, his way to avoid going mad. I think what gets me about February’s first snow drops is their delicacy. In most folk narratives their appearance has strong notions of death, the white petals like a corpse’s shroud, their drooping head sombre. They grow close to the ground, where the dead sleep, and they thrive in quite graveyards. Yet in the story of Persephone, the goddess of both underworld and of vegetation, she carries snowdrops to earth when she is allowed from Hades in spring. The flowers may have an appearance that nods towards death, but they bring the first signs of life to a wintry earth, a spark of warmth and excitement, a feeling somewhat like love itself, on that February morning.
By the time I am publishing this, however, time has moved on, as it so inevitably does in this fleeting space; no matter what moment, or which season you prefer, none can last long. The snow drops are passing, the door has been opened for the bluebells and daffodils, the real flowers of spring that grace Easter time in their bright yellow glory. That small moment of joy at Persephone’s bringing of spring has dissipated now, overtaken by other beauties in the world. I am sure I shall find the first snow drops in some other place, at another time next year, I hope.