The way to the spring equinox was precarious. We began to wonder if spring would come and go, and it would still be winter. Daffodils looked pissed off. Bleachy damson and blackthorn blossom stained early. Rain, cold winds, rain, floods, more rain. Then suddenly this – boom – an explosion of flowers into a moment of balance.
Emerging from the dark half, I thought it might be the Mount Fuji cherry, Prunus serrulata ‘Shirotae’. Battered by decades of standing outside a Shrewsbury nightclub, surrounded by walls and traffic in the corner of a shopping centre due to be demolished, and entangled with gossamer packaging material, this cherry had endured its suffering, and suddenly flowered like a Japanese painting. A Zen moment at the equinox.
We had just come from an exhibition of artwork inspired by the magnificent Darwin oak, as part of the campaign to save it from destruction by the proposed Shrewsbury northern relief road. I wondered if anyone would notice the ragged beauty of this little cherry tree and save it from being sacrificed to redevelopment here. Next to the cherry, surrounded by cobbles, was the stump of another tree, a birch maybe, from which grew a spectacular group of bracket fungi – a reminder that even in death, trees are places of life, and their essential being springs from a secret, subterranean root-world.
Meanwhile, seen from the footbridge across the River Severn, the great hawsers of rainwater twisted towards the Welsh Bridge. Anchored to the hills of mid-Wales, the river dragged mountain bogs, suffering fields and shit-spewing farms and towns seawards. A pair of mallards, their webs ruddering through the flow as fast as flying, slewed into the bank, worrying something edible. She of river colours; he with iridescent head; fastened to each other and to the water’s power in the ancient spring rituals of union. And the light was dazzling, animating the daisies, dandelions and bittercress.
Never mind what AE Housman said about 50 years not being enough to see the cherry trees in flower; 50 years is not enough for the precarious journey of that Mount Fuji cherry to the moon-glow moment of the vernal equinox.
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