Further flowers

Alexander, 16 months old, learned to say the word "flower" during our week in Cornwall. Apart from the garden flowers in the village—aubretia, wallflowers, a clump of marigolds even (it obviously doesn't get very cold in that part of the country)—we found wild flowers everywhere: daisies in the grass, red campions under the hedges, wild garlic blooming on the banks of the canal at Helebridge, masses of primroses (click on the picture above!) together with violets on the banks of the River Neet, and on the path near the whitewashed Salthouse almost falling over the lip of the cliffs at Widemouth Bay—an 18th century fish cellar where the locals used to preserve their pilchards—my mother and I noticed a patch of cochlearia, otherwise known as scurvy grass, because of its high Vitamin C content. In the hedgerows of Pinch Lane grew masses of a greenish umbillifer which I think must have been a kind of angelica.

I appreciated seeing the lambs in the fields as well, the robins, the blackbirds and the wagtails, one of which was a grey wagtail. A pair of swans was nesting by the canal at Bude and at St Ann's Chapel near Tavistock we visited paddocks full of animals, first and foremost the donkeys that had been given sanctuary there.

For some, such details may seem to be mere trivia. Not for me.