Busy bee.

Let the fork do the work.

 Late April/early May is Bluebell season. Needless to say the "rural rambles" aspect of this diary is on hold due to the lockdown so I will have to recall one of my favourite walks at this time of year. It begins in Pewsey in Wiltshire then up onto the range of chalk hills overlooking the Vale of Pewsey.

 There are sweeping views towards the edge of Salisbury Plain on the horizon.

 That alone makes the walk worthwhile but I head across the hills to Gopher Wood.

 It's a classic Bluebell wood by which I mean Hyacinthoides non-scripta, our native Bluebell (also found in northern Europe but most extensively in the UK).

 The woodland floor is carpeted in a haze of shimmering blue-violet. Gopher Wood is pretty wet most years, probably a deposit of clay among the dry chalk grasslands that surround it.

 The Bluebells occupy about half the woods and the other half is an equally dense carpet of Ramsons (Allium ursinum). They meet in the middle like two tides converging. The Bluebells fill the air with a sweet perfume, the Ramsons reek of garlic!

 A few of my favourite flowers in the garden round about now. All are wild species in various parts of the world but very attractive in a 'wild' garden too. Above is the English Iris (Iris latifolia) which in fact originates in the Pyrenees.

 Geranium phaeum is a native of southern, central and western Europe. Sometimes called Dusky Crane's Bill or The Mourning Widow- the maroon flowers do have a somewhat sombre quality.

 Tellima grandiflora, a creeping woodlander from the Pacific North-West of America into Canada. Bumblebees start at the bottom and work their way to the top.

 Ramsons aka Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum). Grows across Europe from Britain to the Caucasus. Carpets damp woods and makes them reek!

 Lamium orvala. A handsome member of the Dead-Nettle family found in central and eastern Europe.

 Silene fimbriata is a woodland Campion, a relative of our Red and White Campions. Hails from the Caucasus but starting to self-seed nicely in a dry shady spot next to the clumps of Lamium orvala. 

 Put up the beanpoles for the Runners I mentioned in my last entry.

 A hill of beans. Well, a handful at least. I sowed a selection of Runner Beans (Phaseoulus coccineus) in pots for planting out on the allotment later in the month. Beans seem to benefit from being started in pots rather than direct sowing.
 The soil needs to be fairly warm -about 10C- to germinate so I improvised a propagator: an ancient folding workbench, a couple of plastic crates and a sheet of glass from a long gone bookcase.
 The phrase "hill of beans" is generally taken to mean something of trifling importance which isn't really the case at all where beans are concerned.

 I sowed three varieties of P. coccineus. The speckled purplish beans are Scarlet Emperor, widely regarded as one of the best and first recorded in cultivation in 1633! The flowers are very scarlet indeed.
 The white beans are a white flowered variety. Appropriately they are called White Lady. I see that the Royal Horticultural Society has awarded them their AGM (Award of Garden Merit). The RHS website also notes that they have PBR (Plant Breeders' Rights). This is a form of copyright when a grower develops a distinctively new cultivar, although there is a certain amount of controversy among horticulturalists as to when and how this should be applied.
 The small black beans at the back of the plate are known as Trail of Tears and were given to me by my brother recently. They have a fascinating though grim history. They are sometimes known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears and were indeed a staple food source of that tribe.
 In 1838 the Cherokee Nation were forced to relocate from their ancestral homelands in Georgia to a reservation in Oklahoma over a thousand miles away to make way for agriculture and gold prospecting. Over ten thousand souls were marched at gunpoint in the harshest of winters and thousands died. They took with them such possessions as they could carry including a quantity of these beans. That long and deadly journey was the Trail of Tears which gives the beans their name.
 I have watched a video posted by a gardener in Oklahoma who grows Trail of Tears. He mentions that he got his from a seed exchange where they were donated by a descendant of those Cherokee. Almost two hundred years later we can grow them still. And think of the sentiment that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 A delightful froth. Cow Parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) and Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens). A lovely contrast between the white umbellifers of A. sylvestris and the blue forget-me-not flowers of P. sempervirens.

 And equally lovely- Buttercups (Ranunculus spp.) among Green Alkanet.