Thresholds

No snow! And everywhere has changed. There are snowdrops, hundreds, purple violas in the bee border, there are honey bees out and flying round the hives. In two days of sun, more plants open, the lawns have a sudden rash of daises. The Persian Ironwood flushes a deep pink and I can see it from far across the garden. The most frequent visitor has a baby in a sling and another who kicks up its heels and runs, and runs! In the vaults, the Herbarium should be classed as one of the wonders of the world, deeply frozen to move here from its home at Plant Sciences and beyond, it is being painstakingly filed, recorded, its treasures made available to anyone who wants to visit. Here they will find Henslow’s wonderful lecture illustrations, his grasses ranked by size to show their variation and Darwin’s plants from the Beagle voyage, the definitive, that is, the ‘type species’ of trees and plants edged in crimson. Our first visit from the students was a mixture of discovery and rekindled memories of first visits many years ago; a picnic by the fountain, the stepping stones, falling in the water! They left the Garden with treasure bags filled with cones, seeds, fallen flowers and the knowledge that it takes four people at full stretch to hug the Giant Redwood.

Ann Gray, poet in residence at the Botanic Garden