Wildflowers.

Wildflowers have been in the hedges and on my mind in the recent week. I love this time of year and all of the colours that fill up the land, the bright and liberal sprinklings of floral shades. I have been writing wildflowers into all my prose, poems and stories, inspired, I’m sure, by the quickening land around me. And to top it all off my brother and his girlfriend bought me a book on hedgerows as a get well present for an illness I recently recovered from: The Hedgerow Handbook by Adele Nozedar.

It’s a pretty awesome book, I’ve enjoyed perusing it and learning that plants I’m familiar with are, in fact, edible. There were plenty of plants in the book that I knew tasted good, or could be made to taste good but there were also surprises like Himalayan Balsam, who knew you could eat it?

I’ve also been writing wildflowers into a lot of my pieces of writing. Wildflower people have made appearances in poems about change and the environment, as well as in more mystical and fantastical pieces.

For me there is little that is quite as lovely as walking along paths that are lined with wildflowers, growing strong and free, without the cultivation that most garden flowers need. I know that years ago primroses and cowslips used to be so prolific that they were picked so much that they became almost rare. Primroses are still plentiful in the hedgerows where I grew up but I always consider the sighting of a cowslip kind of lucky, I never pick them and didn’t as a child. Whenever I see cowslips I thing of Ariel’s quote from Shakespeare’s Tempest:

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie:
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”
(Ariel, Act 5 Scene 1)

My dad used to quote it to me when we saw Cowslips and it holds a special place in my heart and memory, plus I like the fusion of my experience of nature and literature.

There are many flowers that are special to me. Bluebells with their heady, musky scent and haunting stories about being the bells that herald death. Meadowsweet for its frothy foam-like grace, buttercups for the childlike games, forget-me-nots, campions, dandelion, dog rose. There are so many beautiful flowers and I love them all.

I want to celebrate all of the beautiful flowers that we have in the land, so I plan to experiment and explore recipes that focus of the use of wildflowers. Some of these recipes will be from Adele Nozedar’s The Hedgerow Handbook, and some will be from other places, or made up by me, and I will post the recipes and results for others to enjoy. I plan for this to be a monthly blog post called “Wildflower Recipes” and the recipes should be themed with the flowers that are available in the particular month (so winter might be a bit hard). The first one willbe coming soon.

Oatly