Going for gold
Don't laugh but at the age of seven I sang a verse from a hymn and promised to be good for ever more when I saw my first kingcups down by the river. Then when I saw the blue of my first song thrush's egg I promised never to swear again.
Many years later, I could easily understand how Beethoven's five year old feelings about the countryside eventually erupted into the Pastoral Symphony.
Love of nature sounds a bit wet. But if you ignore the bad advice of the urban sophisticate you may find nature is a bedrock. As Sir David Attenborough said 'How did most people lose their interest in Nature?'
On the other hand, perhaps you are simply born with it. My brothers and sisters were more obsessed with meccano, model yachts and make-up while I was among the marsh marigolds.
Last week on the Arun there was the same bubble of joy when I came across Caltha palustris sending up its green spears among the reeds at Greatham bridge, though I knew it was no use pretending to be good for evermore.
This flower is often more prima rosa than the primrose in that it is listed first in some flower books and heads the buttercup family which has about 1,300 species world wide. Sussex has about 34 of them, the most unlikely 'buttercup' being clematis or traveller's joy until you look at this woody climber's leaf and compare it with the buttercups in the meadows when you can see a vague family likeness.
Not often is the 'buttercup' allowed to shine across the meadow, but in my youth they were like the yellow stars on summer nights. Held beneath a girl's white throat the golden glow shone incandescent, turning her to an angel.
I am lucky in life to have none but good memories as a bedrock. When it got too hot in the kitchen I shot off into the great outdoors. There is so much to see there.
The complexities of natural lives being born or lost, of colours in sky and water, of season changes and the symphonies of sounds soon replace the dreariest that humans offer as alternatives to life.
But coming back to earth: the buttercup. There are three species in Sussex that are virtually ubiquitous: creeping, meadow, and bulbous and they all look fairly alike as they open their gold cups in the noonday.
But I suppose the meadow is pretty obvious with its deeply cut leaves, while the creeping has obvious runners.
There are several other true buttercups here to look out for.
Goldilocks grows in the damp woods for instance, while corn buttercup used to grow in the old cornfields but nowadays I find it in waste places like the edges of old gravel works near Funtington.
The oddest looking buttercup I think is that very rare little crittur in that very hot spot at the bottom of the steep slope in Kingley Vale.
This is one of only four places in West Sussex; East Sussex having lost it altogether since the 1930s.
It is called the small, or least-flowered buttercup. You wouldn't think it was a buttercup actually, with its weedy, sprawling strands more like a green spiders' web on which you can just about see the merest apology for flowers. But I love to see it every spring though I leave out the verse from the evening hymn these days.
Even celandines are buttercups, and they are enough to make anyone smile in these gloomy days of nothing going right. Perhaps fishermen in Sussex know their water crowfoots, but possibly only the botanists know that our county has nine species, all of them true buttercups.
My father introduced one of them to the Bray in Devon and the Liffey in Northern Ireland where it became a scourge and was known as Williamson's Weed. Now that brings a smile to my lips. The Province needs a bit of all things bright and beautiful.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
