ENGLAND IN SPRING

  The English countryside in the spring is like a trip to the local paint store.  In the paint store are racks and racks of cards with samples of various colors on them.   If you’re looking for a blue paint, you have a million gradations of blue to choose from:  sea foam mist, azure, rainy day blues, robin shell, one square sample after another displayed on slips of paper for you to take home and try out against your walls.   

The English countryside in this unbelievably warm and gorgeous spring is the green section of the paint store.  No matter how many slips of paper, no matter how many samples of green, there aren’t enough to describe or catalogue the dazzling displays of green in all of its gradations and strata.  I feel like I’ve fallen head first into an artist’s palette of green: it’s everywhere, in the buoyant grass, the giant chestnut trees, the hedgerows dividing blazing emerald fields into farmed squares.  The air itself is tinged green with reflections from exuberant vegetation.
 

But a monochromatic world, even an emerald one, would lose its appeal at some point.  That’s where the flowers come in. There is wisteria everywhere, all of it artfully arranged into cascading swirls of purple hanging along the edges of roofs, stretching across stone and brick walls, tumbling over fences.  Lilacs are in huge exuberant bunches, purple and white and violet colored.  The wisteria cascades down in garlands of purple, the lilacs promenade down sidewalks and in gardens, the grass shimmers with spring-green spreen, and I find myself waiting for Jemima Puddleduck and Peter Cottontail to come out from under the bushes and serve me tea and speak in little British quacks and grunts.  Beatrice Potter may not have made up talking bunnies and duckies; they may be here, living in this fairy tale greenery of spring.
 

Max and I tried to avert Jeff’s eyes from the wisteria for the first few days we were in London.  Our wisteria at home produces enough leaves to carpet the planet in an inch of duff but nary a single fragrant blossom.  Every spring Jeff threatens to torture it into blossoming because that’s what you have to do, according to a gardening book I once read:  you’ve got to chop at the roots and feed it lye or some fertilizer/poison product to distress it into producing blossoms (this Earthday, why not try the ecologically sound alternative to saturating the ground with lye/fertilizer/poison?  Simply play recordings of Sarah Palin saying “You betcha” and Donald Trump blathering on about Obama’s birthplace and that should do the trick. In no time, you’ll be hip deep in wisteria blooms.)  As we walked by cascading waterfalls of purple wisteria blossoms, Max and I would make choking sounds and muffled screams to show how the plant was being tortured into producing beauty.  “Each flowering branch is a howl of pain!” we told Jeff.  It didn’t work.  For several days he tried to puzzle out why the wisteria is so prolific but now he’s concluded that it’s English wisteria and therefore works off of some complicated British gardening rule that he couldn’t hope to replicate with our ‘Murikan plant.   
 

Wisteria is not the only blossom in town. The train from London to southern England took us through fields punctuated with acres of molten yellow flowers, great swathes of yellow blasting out of the greenery.  Every blossom is the exact same height.  Did every single seed sprout in not only the same week but the same day and perhaps the same moment?  There are no stragglers who are shorter than the others, and no giants towering above the rest.  They are uniform and perfect, acres and acres of blazing yellow that look less like flower patches and more like the earth and air just happen to be gold.  I had to squint to look at them, they were so bright.

As the train rumbled through the countryside from  Portsmouth to Bath, we went past little villages with the stone church steeple and a few houses.  Zip into view they came, zip out they went again, bookended on either side by the verdant expanses of fields and the shimmering blocks of gold.  The lambs were joined by calves; it became a clash of the cuties.  Then out the window I see, etched in chalk on the hillside, a giant figure of a white horse.  Oh that¸ it’s just a prehistoric chalk drawing, etched onto the side of a blindingly green hill, made for unknown reasons, by people who lived centuries ago.  Prehistoric graffiti.  LeRoy Wuz Here.  
 

Arriving at the Bath train station we hailed a cab and headed out into the countryside that I’ve been observing from the trains.  Down we went on winding narrow roads lined with tall leafy hedges, bordered by patches of glittering golden flowers, until we come to Farmborough, the village where we’ve rented a cottage for a few days.  School Cottage, to be exact.  Address?  The Street.  I can imagine an Abbott and Costello routine: 
 

“So where’s this cottage we’re lookin’ for? 

 The Street. 

Well of course it’s on a street, I know that much, but what’s the name of the street?

The Street. 

Now just wait a minute, smart alek, what’s the name of the cotton pickin street? 

The Street . . .”  and on and on. 
 

At first we drove right past School Cottage on The Street and mistakenly pulled into The Cottage on The Street.  Opps, wrong cottage.  Back out we went and further down to The Ivy Cottage on The Street but that was wrong too.  At this point I began to wonder if every dwelling had not only a name, but a name with an article before it:  The this, and The that.  What would our house be?  The House of the Mean Cat. 
 

But finally we found School Cottage on The Street in Farmborough, which was one of the English villages mentioned in the Domesday Book that William the Conqueror had his boys write to keep a record of towns, villages, properties and general goods in 11^th century England.  We make our way back through Farmborough and find School Cottage which has, of course, luxuriant plumes of wisteria cascading down its stone sides and for an added bonus, pale pink clematis flowering around the eaves of its wee little roof.  There’s a blindingly green yard filled with all manner of flowering bushes, and in the back of the garden are happy chickens clucking around and pygmy goats with their babies, who immediately wrest the title of Cutest Baby Animal from the lamb-calf tie.  A duck couple pads around, and there’s a little fishpond with goldfish.  Left for us in the cottage by the owner are a half-dozen eggs from the happy free range chickens and some home-made jam for the morning. 

England in spring.  Pass the color samples, please.