Primroses

 

My paternal grandmother was a matriarch.  I won't bore you by telling you loads of stories about her and about our family, but I will say that when we lived reasonably close to it (i.e. within a couple of counties(!)), she used to ring three or four times over the Spring and Summer and ‘ask’ to be driven back to the village she came from.  It is a lovely village and was well worth the repeated trips, but then again, I wasn’t the one tasked with the driving.

Every year, at the appropriate time, she would also ring my father and ‘ask’ to be driven along local roads so that she could admire the catkins on the trees.  She would also ‘ask’ to be driven along what is now a busy dual carriageway to admire the primroses growing on the embankments.  You couldn't drive that slowly along there now, but primroses always remind me of her and I always smile when I see the first ones of the year.  She was a wonderful woman.

I inherited a love of nature from both sides of my family, and I try to go for a good walk every weekend if the weather is amenable.  I love watching crops growing from seed to harvest and I love the changing of the seasons in the woodlands, heaths, hedgerows, fens and grasslands.  A highlight for me is red kites soaring overhead; my grandmother never saw one because she passed away before they were reintroduced to England.

Neither my grandmother nor my father are with us now, but they wouldn't have seen this particular clump of primroses from a car.  They are growing a good half mile from the nearest road.  I stood up from photographing them when I was out walking and found several very skittish fallow deer watching me from what they felt was a safe distance.  Seeing a human was probably quite a novelty for them!