The Blackthorn Winter
The cold has settled back over the country, the way it does every year when the blackthorn is in flower. The rooks are rebuilding above the village in their usual style, which is to say loudly and dishonestly. Easter is at the end of the week, and the calendar is doing what it always does in early April – catching up with itself. This week: a riot on Otmoor that nobody arranged and nobody was prosecuted for, the blossom that flowers before it has any right to, a violet that vanishes while you are smelling it, and a churchyard walk for Easter weekend.
On the Horizon
If you have a rookery near you – and in Hertfordshire you almost certainly do, in the tall ash and elm at the edge of every village – it will be properly loud now. Not birdsong exactly. More like a parish meeting that has got slightly out of hand.
Rooks mate for life and return to the same nest site year after year, which sounds romantic until you watch them. Nest-building in a rookery is less a cooperative effort and more an exercise in competitive theft. A stick carried up from the ground gets stolen the moment a back is turned, stolen back, stolen again. The nest gets built eventually, mostly out of sticks the same rooks stole the day before.
The chiffchaffs are back. You will hear one before you see it – two notes from somewhere in the willows, repeated for as long as you care to stand and listen, the same two notes the bird has been singing since it left West Africa six weeks ago. It is the sound of the temperature finally settling, and once you know it you will hear it from car parks and bus stops and the bush at the end of someone else’s drive.
On warmer afternoons, the brimstones are moving in the hedgerows. That sharp clean yellow against an April sky, looking as though it has been cut from a different month and pasted in by mistake.
The Sky This Week
Sunrise 6.27am · Sunset 7.29pm
Moon Full, tonight.
Harwich tides High 12.55am and 12.55pm · Low 6.30am and 6.36pm.
The sky is doing some of the work this week. If you step outside just after sunset, you have a rare chance to see Mercury. It is at greatest eastern elongation, which means it is as visible as it ever gets from Britain. Look low in the western sky, just above the horizon, before it drops. You have about forty minutes from sunset before it goes. Tonight’s full moon will rise opposite, in the east, almost exactly as Mercury sets in the west – a pleasing geometry if you happen to be on a hill with a clear view both ways.
Sky data: Sunrise and sunset, timeanddate.com · Moon phase, Royal Museums Greenwich · Tide times, UKHO EasyTide
The Curious Instance of the Riot at Otmoor
If you have not been to Otmoor, it is a flat, low, perpetually damp stretch of ground in Oxfordshire – the kind of place that holds water in its ditches all year and floods reliably every winter. Seven parishes had been grazing it, cutting its reeds, and fishing its channels since before anyone thought to write such things down, which in England means since roughly forever. The rights were so established, so unquestionable, that nobody bothered documenting them.
In 1815, Parliament looked at Otmoor and decided that all of this was inefficient. Common land, they explained, was wasteful. Private land was productive. The seven parishes lost the rights they had never thought to document, because it had never crossed their minds that documentation would be necessary. The landowners gained their fields. The fences went up.
On a September morning in 1830, several hundred men and women got up before dawn, walked out onto the moor, and tore every last one of them down.
Forty-four were arrested, marched to Oxford for trial, and the road to Oxford passes through villages. The villages had heard what was coming. By the time the guards reached the city the crowd around them had grown so large and pressed so close that the prisoners simply vanished – dissolved into the St Giles fair, into doorways and back lanes and the magnificent collective amnesia of a community that had decided not to have seen anything.
The landowners rebuilt the fences. The parishes tore them down again. And again after that, for the better part of a decade. No leaders were named. No manifesto appeared. No written communication between the seven parishes survives in any archive. They simply knew when to act, and acted together, and went home.
If you want to see what survived, RSPB Otmoor occupies a stretch of the original common at the eastern edge, near Beckley. Early April is the best time to go. The lapwings are displaying – that wild tumbling flight over the wet grassland, the call that gives them their other name, peewit – and the reedbeds are starting to wake up. Bring a coat. The wind off Otmoor in April is not a spring wind.
Further reading: Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, Vol. V · British Newspaper Archive · RSPB Otmoor reserve
The Hedge
Holy Week in the Hedgerow
That same cold is doing something else this week, in every hedgerow in England. The blackthorn is flowering – white blossom on bare dark wood, before the plant has a single leaf to show for itself.
In a normal English spring, blackthorn flowers in the exact weeks as Holy Week – Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter. This is phenology rather than theology, the natural calendar running alongside the liturgical one, but to people for whom both calendars were equally real and equally binding, the coincidence meant something. Flowering before there is any visible life to sustain it. To eyes trained on the Easter story, this was not coincidence. It was resurrection, made botanical, happening quietly in the hedge while everyone was looking at the church.
The wood told a different story. Blackthorn was claimed – the claim attached itself to several plants, but blackthorn’s combination of vicious spines and white blossom made it stick in the English imagination – as one of the possible sources of the Crown of Thorns. The wood was said to be favoured by witches for their staves, cut on dark nights for potency. And the blossom brought indoors was specifically, firmly, repeatedly forbidden across England, in households that had no contact with each other and no shared explanation. Folks in Yorkshire, Cornwall, and the Welsh borders all kept the same rule. The certainty predates the explanations. The fear comes before the story.
What is harder to account for is why the rule held with such absolute conviction. People obeyed it because their mothers obeyed it, and that was reason enough. Dorothy Hartley, writing in 1954, recorded the prohibition without bothering to argue with it. She simply noted that the blossom stayed outside, where it belonged, and moved on to the next subject.
If you walk past a flowering blackthorn this week, the simplest test is in the scent. Hawthorn smells of trimethylamine, the chemistry of decay, which is one explanation for the indoor taboo on hawthorn blossom. Blackthorn smells of almost nothing at all – a little sweet, a little green – yet the prohibition held across the country regardless.
Source: Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (1954), still in print
The Garden Plot
Weather Watch
The same blackthorn winter has arrived on schedule, as it almost always does. Night temperatures are dropping back toward frost in low-lying ground and sheltered hollows, and the soil at 10cm depth is sitting well below the 7°C threshold at which seeds germinate reliably. The days are lengthening visibly, but the warmth is taking its time.
For the longer game
Start chitting seed potatoes now if you have not already. Three weeks on a bright, cool windowsill – not a warm kitchen one – before they go into ground that is ready for them, which in most of England will not be until late April at the earliest. Cool and bright is what you want, because the shoots that result should be short and sturdy, not the long pale things that happen when a potato is in too much of a hurry.
For this Week
Purple sprouting broccoli is at its absolute best right now, and if you grow your own, you will already know that what comes out of the garden on a cold April morning bears almost no resemblance to what sits in a supermarket bag. Cut it young, steam it briefly, eat it with butter and a little salt while it is still warm.
The chore
Cast an eye over any bare-root roses, hedging, or fruit trees you put in over winter. Frost lifts the roots quietly, and a plant that seems perfectly healthy above ground may be barely touching the soil beneath it. Press the base back in firmly with your heel and water it well if the ground is dry. Five minutes now can save something you have been waiting years to establish.
The Larder
Wild Garlic
If you walk into an old wood this week – a damp one, beech or oak, somewhere with a stream running through it – you will smell it before you see it. The smell is in your hair by the time you leave.
Wild garlic, Allium ursinum, was the working countryman's seasoning long before garlic bulbs were grown in any quantity in England. Dorothy Hartley, in Food in England (1954), records it as a leaf cooked into broths and stuffings, particularly with mutton. Older still: the place names give it away. Ramsbottom in Lancashire, Ramsey in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Man, Ramsdell in Hampshire – all from hramsa, the Old English for wild garlic. The Anglo-Saxons named whole valleys after the smell.
Pick the leaves before the flowers open. They go coarse once flowering starts, the same way nettles do. The leaves are unmistakable once you smell them; nothing else in an English wood smells like that. But before you smell them, they look slightly like lily of the valley, which is poisonous. The rule is simple: if the leaf does not smell of garlic when you crush it, do not eat it.
Wild Garlic Pesto
Ingredients
- A good handful of wild garlic leaves, washed and dried (roughly 100g)
- A handful of toasted hazelnuts or pine nuts
- A piece of hard cheese — Parmesan, Berkswell, or aged Lincolnshire Poacher
- Juice of half a lemon
- A glug of olive oil
- Salt
Method
- Toast the nuts in a dry pan until golden and fragrant. Tip onto a board to cool.
- Strip any tough stems from the wild garlic leaves.
- Put the leaves, nuts, and a generous handful of grated cheese into a food processor with the lemon juice and a pinch of salt.
- Blitz, dribbling in olive oil through the feed tube, until you have a coarse paste — not too smooth.
- Taste. Adjust salt, lemon, and cheese as needed.
Stir through hot pasta, drop onto a poached egg, or use in place of butter on grilled fish. Keeps a fortnight in the fridge under a film of olive oil. Freezes well in ice-cube trays.
The leaves do not dry well – they lose all their character. They freeze beautifully, though, blitzed to a paste with a little oil and frozen in ice-cube trays. The flower buds, picked just before they open, can be pickled in a light brine for a week and then in white wine vinegar for a month. They come out tasting like very small caper-onions and last most of the year. By the time you have used the last of them, the wild garlic is up again.
Identification: Woodland Trust wild garlic guide – clear photographs of wild garlic and lily of the valley side by side
The Still-Room
Sweet Violet
The same damp banks where the wild garlic is loudest are usually where you find the other thing worth gathering this week. The sweet violet grows low, at the base of walls and hedges, in the shadier corners of the same old woods. Easy to miss entirely until you are almost on top of it.
It contains a compound called ionone, which briefly disables the olfactory nerves on contact. So you smell it, then it disappears, then it returns a few moments later as though nothing had happened. The violet keeps vanishing and reappearing, which accounts for centuries of people pressing their faces into the same patch of flowers wondering what happened to the scent.
Herbalists used the flowers and leaves for coughs and sore throats throughout the medieval and early modern period, made into syrups for winter chests – a cold-weather remedy gathered and bottled in early spring, before the flowers closed. The syrup, when it comes, is a deep and rather improbable blue-purple. The anthocyanins in the petals work as a natural indicator of acidity. Add a few drops of lemon juice and it shifts to pink in seconds. It looks like a trick the first time, and it is entirely real.
Syrup of Violets
after Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet (1664)
Ingredients
- A good double handful of violet flowers — petals only, no green
- Half a pint of just-boiled water
- White sugar, equal weight to the strained liquid
Method
- Place the petals in a bowl, pour the just-boiled water over them, cover with a cloth, and leave overnight.
- Strain through muslin the following morning, pressing the spent flowers firmly. Weigh the liquid.
- Add an equal weight of white sugar. Heat gently, stirring, until dissolved and slightly thickened. Do not boil.
- Bottle warm into a small sterilised jar. Keeps several weeks in the fridge.
A spoonful in sparkling water, over a plain sponge, or in warm water with lemon. Add a few drops of lemon juice to turn the whole thing pink.
Source text: Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet, 1664, on archive.org
The Weekend Walk
The Easter Churchyard
Easter Sunday is two days away. The wild garlic in the Larder is one map of where the old woods are; here is another. The old churchyards of Hertfordshire are worth your time this weekend – the ones with yews, where the grass has not been cut yet and the boundary walls are thick with moss. Find the oldest one near you and go in.
In the undisturbed turf along the edges you will find primroses in numbers that would surprise anyone who only knows them from garden centres, and in the shadier corners, wood anemones – pale and unearthly, closing up at dusk and opening again in the morning. Stand with your back to the church door and look at where the ground meets the lane. Most old English churchyards sit higher than the surrounding land, raised over centuries by the accumulated burials of everyone who ever lived in the parish. Some of that ground has been undisturbed since before the church was built.
Walk back via the lanes rather than the road. In early April an old holloway is at its best, the banks still bare enough to read, the blackthorn above them still flowering. Look for the primroses along the eastern wall as you leave. They mark the older, undisturbed ground, and they keep their position year after year – the same clumps in the same spots – which means a churchyard with primroses along its eastern wall has had primroses along its eastern wall for as long as anyone has been buried in it.
An Old Word for It
Peewit. The country name for the lapwing, recorded in Northern English and Scots from at least the seventeenth century, taken directly from the bird’s call – two clear syllables, the second rising. Still in common use in much of upland Britain, though the lapwing itself has retreated since the war: roughly an eighty per cent decline in England alone since 1960, mostly due to changes in arable farming. The word survives where the bird does, which is a rough but useful map. Listen for it over the wet grassland at RSPB Otmoor this week, or any chalk-edge meadow with damp ground.
Source: RSPB lapwing population data · Cassell’s English Dictionary (1891) · Oxford English Dictionary
In Good Report
The National Trust is reporting that this year's blossom season is opening earlier and more abundantly than usual, the result of a wet winter followed by a sharp rise in temperature through the second half of March, which is precisely the sequence that triggers a heavy bloom. Whether it holds through April depends entirely on how long the blackthorn winter now settling over the country lasts. The Met Office has a view. I don't believe the blackthorn has been consulted. Nobody knows.
Source: National Trust, March 2026
The Turning Wheel
5 April – Palm Sunday. The traditional opening of Holy Week.
6 April – Old Lady Day. The original New Year in the English agricultural and financial calendar before the 1752 calendar reform; still felt in some farm tenancies and in the start of the British tax year.
10 April – Good Friday. Hot cross buns; the old prohibition on bread baked on this day going mouldy.
12 April – Easter Sunday.
Yours, until Thursday.
Meg.
