White on black

We don't have any old maps and deeds for our house so the details of the farm land it once held are gone. But a few days ago my neighbour told me that this field, one I've blipped several times before , was called parc llwyn ddu, black bush field. The black bush, he explained, was the blackthorn to be found (still) in the hedges - and as can be seen here it's in flower right now, creamy white alongside the gold of the gorse.

This time of the year used to be called blackthorn winter if the blossom coincided with a dreaded cold snap that could endanger young animals and check new growth. In 1775, Parson Gilbert White, the early natural historian of the southern English village of Selborne in Hampshire, entered in his diary on April 7th:

Dark sun, harsh wind. The blackthorn begins to blow (bloom) . This tree usually blossoms while cold northeast winds blow, so that the harsh rugged weather obtaining at this season is called by the country people blackthorn winter.

Blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, has been a supremely important shrub from time immemorial, used as stock fencing with its sharp spines and as a source of the invaluable blue-black fruit, the sloe, ancestor of all plums and damsons. In Ireland its hard wood was used to make shillelaghs and the way its flowers appear on the branches before the leaves - white on black - symbolised in Celtic culture the juxtaposition of life and death.