The Hawthorn Veil

It is the strangest week of the year for the hedges. The blackthorn went over a fortnight ago and the hawthorn has come up behind it, louder and stranger and considerably better at filling a lane with unexpected smells. By the time this issue lands the trees on the Wallington Road will be solid white from a hundred yards off. This week: the well-dressing at Tissington, the hedge as a parliamentary decision, sweet woodruff and Maibowle, a meadow at ground level.

On the Horizon

Out on the lanes the petals are starting to brown at the edges. By the end of next week the wind will have worked them loose and the path will be dusted with them; the blossom at full strength now is the blossom about to go. The honeybees are at the orchard, a continuous close hum that carries from twenty feet off, and if you walk early enough you have the road to yourself. The swifts are back over the rooftops, scream-circling at dusk – two months behind the swallows, three behind the wheatears. Fox cubs are out on the verges at dusk, larger each week. Asparagus is at its best, fat and straight before the spears go woody. The verges have come up shoulder-high in cow parsley, opening alongside the hawthorn; orange-tips work the umbels in the late afternoon. There is light at the back door past nine now. Ascension Day falls on the 14th this year, with Whitsun ten days behind it.

The Sky This Week

Sunrise 05:09  ·  Sunset 20:46
Moon  New Moon, Sat 16 May, 21:01 BST
Harwich tides  Low 03:56  ·  High 10:22  ·  Low 16:13.

After sunset on Tuesday 19 May, look low to the west: Jupiter, Venus, and a thin crescent moon will sit together as the sky darkens. The crescent will be only a few days old, easy to miss if you arrive too early. Venus is the brightest of the three; Jupiter sits to its upper left. Wait until about ten past nine, when the colour has gone out of the sky and the planets come up sharp.

Source: timeanddate.com, Baldock · Royal Observatory Greenwich · UKHO EasyTide

The Curious Instance of the Tissington Wells

Ascension Day this year falls on 14 May, which is when the village of Tissington in Derbyshire dresses its six wells. Not with posies on the rim. With wooden boards taller than a person, covered in wet clay and set behind each spring, on which whole biblical scenes have been built one petal at a time.

The work takes three days. A team gathers in the village hall over the long weekend before Ascension, the design traced into the clay with alder cones or coffee beans, then filled in with flower petals, mosses, seeds, and small leaves. Each petal is laid one by one and overlapped like roof tiles so that rain will run off. The boards are finished on the eve of Ascension Day; the vicar blesses them at the morning service the following day, and the procession moves through the village from one well to the next.

Tissington tells two stories about why. The first is the Black Death of 1348: while neighbouring villages were struck, Tissington’s springs kept flowing clean and the village was spared. The second is the drought of 1615, recorded in the parish register at nearby Youlgreave – between the 25th of March and the 4th of August only three showers fell, much of the land was burnt up, and Tissington’s wells alone held water. Neither story can now be verified. The custom in its present form is documented from 1818, when Ebenezer Rhodes described it in print as an ancient custom of “boards covered in moist clay into which the stems of flowers are inserted.” Earlier village memory has the wells decked in garlands of tulips; the clay-board version is a nineteenth-century elaboration.

The boards stay up for a week. By the second Sunday after Ascension the petals are dropping and the figures are losing their faces, and the boards come down for another year. Other Derbyshire villages dress their wells later in the summer; Tissington is the earliest. To see the boards at full colour, the only window is the week after Ascension.

Sources: Ebenezer Rhodes, Peak Scenery (1818) · Welldressing.com: Tissington

The Hedge

Hawthorn as Boundary Marker

The hedges along the fields on the way out of every English village are not a natural feature of the landscape. They are a decision, hammered out in parliamentary acts and executed by surveyors and labourers who marched across the fields to plant the whips. The Enclosure Commissioners chose hawthorn because it works: it grows fast, becomes stockproof in a few years, tolerates being cut and laid, and regenerates from a stump if you chop it back to nothing. Beauty in May was a byproduct.

If you know what to look for, an enclosure hedge is easy to read. A near-monoculture of hawthorn running in a straight line across a parish is enclosure-era. The straight line is the giveaway: it follows a surveyor’s ruler. Ancient boundaries follow the terrain instead, curving along the line of an old stream or the foot of a slope. The difference is still visible from the air.

In the field, the Hooper method is the test. Count the woody species in a thirty-metre stretch and multiply by a hundred to get an approximate age in years. A near-monoculture of hawthorn suggests a hundred years – classic enclosure. Five species (hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, hazel, dogwood) suggests five hundred, a boundary that was there before parliament got involved. It is a rule of thumb rather than a hard law, but it is a brilliant starting point for reading the history of a field.

An older, stranger taboo runs alongside the practical reasons. Cut hawthorn brought into the house was held to be an omen of death, recorded across England and Wales well into the twentieth century. The chemistry has caught up with the superstition: hawthorn flowers contain trimethylamine, the same compound the human nose registers in early-stage decomposition. Folks who refused to bring the blossom indoors were not being irrational. They were responding to a smell their noses had every reason to mistrust.

In mid-May, when the hawthorn hits full blossom, these distinctions stop mattering. Whether ancient or enclosure, curved or straight, every hedge is in full white flower, thick with the scent of honey and trimethylamine. For three weeks each year, the map and the memory align, and every hedge looks the same.

Sources: Pollard, Hooper & Moore, Hedges (Collins New Naturalist, 1974) · The Inclosure Acts 1773–1882 · Plantlife species note: hawthorn

The Garden Plot

Weather Watch

Thursday opens breezy, with fresh easterly winds, before the week warms sharply – Friday could reach 22°C in the afternoon. The warmth arrives with rain: a wet spell is forecast to move through on Friday afternoon, the first real rain in a fortnight, with the winds easing into the weekend. If you want hawthorn blossom for the butter or the cordial, pick it Thursday or early Friday – it does not pick well wet, and the warm air will carry the flower past its best within days.

The Longer Game

If you are aiming at colour for late summer, now is the time to sow cosmos, zinnias, or annual sweet peas. They are quick from seed in May warmth and will be ready to go out in six weeks, just as the spring flush is fading. I have a second tray of zinnias going on the kitchen windowsill this week.

This Week

Asparagus is at full strength now, and the spears want cutting every other day while it lasts. The season runs six weeks and then it is gone until next year. Cut at soil level when the spears reach about 20cm, and eat them the same day if you can: flavour honestly drops off within hours.

Maintenance

If you grow gooseberries or currants, this is the week to start checking for sawfly caterpillars. They will strip a bush in three days if you take your eye off. Pick them off by hand now, before the damage compounds.

The Larder

Hawthorn blossom

In Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England (1954), the hawthorn flower goes simply by its old name: May. Hartley gives a recipe for a delicate May syrup, the blossom infused into a sugar syrup and used to sweeten springtime puddings, and she records a heartier “bread and cheese” pudding made by farm workers in blossom season – the young flower buds and leaves layered with thin strips of bacon inside a suet crust. The “bread and cheese” of the name is the hedge itself: hawthorn leaves were the country child’s free spring snack, picked and eaten straight from the branch.

Hawthorn Butter

Ingredients

• 250g unsalted butter, softened
• 2 large handfuls of hawthorn blossom, picked from the hedge that morning
• Zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
• A pinch of fine sea salt

Method

1. Strip the flowers from the stalks – discard the stems, which are bitter.
2. Fold the flowers and lemon zest into the softened butter with a pinch of salt.
3. Spoon onto a sheet of greaseproof paper, roll into a log, twist the ends, and chill until firm.
4. Slice discs onto grilled fish, lamb chops, or warm toast.

Use blossom from hedges away from busy roads. The butter keeps a week in the fridge or three months in the freezer.

For a quieter version in the modern kitchen, hawthorn blossom butter is honestly worth the ten minutes it takes. I make a batch most years for the freezer. The flavour is subtle, more scent than taste, but unmistakably floral; a single disc carries, in one mouthful, what the lane has smelt like all week.

The blossom itself does not keep, but if you want to carry the smell into the summer, it makes a cordial that does. Cold-infuse a handful of fresh flowers in a sugar syrup with the zest and juice of a lemon overnight in the fridge, strain through muslin, and bottle. Used in cold drinks through July and August, it brings the smell of the May hedges back at midsummer when the white is long gone.

Sources: Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (1954) · Plantlife species note: hawthorn

The Still-Room

Sweet Woodruff

Away from the bright white of the hawthorn hedges, the woodland floor has its own May crop, and it is one I keep meaning to gather and forgetting until it is over. Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) flowers in deep shade under hawthorn and beech, where little else grows. The leaves are narrow whorls arranged like the spokes of a tiny wheel; the flowers are four-petalled, white, and held just above. Fresh from the ground it has no scent worth noticing. The thing it is famous for – that hay-and-vanilla sweetness, with hints of almond and new-mown grass – only develops once the plant is dried, when the coumarin in the leaves is released and intensifies as the plant cures.

Coumarin is the same compound that gives freshly cut hay its smell, and woodruff was strewn on floors and packed into mattresses for exactly that reason. It was a household perfume before the household had anything else. In Germany and Alsace it has a specific May role: it is the central ingredient in Maibowle, a white wine punch made by steeping the wilted leaves in a light Riesling for a few hours before serving with strawberries floating on top. The drink is associated with the first of May and with weddings, and it is one of those traditions that has survived not because anyone has insisted on it but because the drink is genuinely good.

Dorothy Hartley, writing in 1954, records sweet woodruff being used in English country houses as a strewing herb and an infusion well into the nineteenth century. By her time it was already a memory in most houses, displaced by lavender and rose. The plant itself is still common in old woodland and ancient hedge bottoms across England; Hertfordshire is well off for it. It is genuinely worth gathering a small handful in May while the leaves are fresh and the flowers are open.

Maibowle

Ingredients

• 1 bottle (75cl) light Riesling or Sylvaner, well-chilled
• 2 generous handfuls fresh sweet woodruff leaves, wilted (see method)
• 6 ripe strawberries, hulled and halved
• A little caster sugar or honey to taste, optional

Method

1. Pick sweet woodruff in the morning from deep shade under hawthorn or beech. Spread the leaves on a tray and wilt at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours until soft but not dry.
2. Tie the wilted leaves loosely with kitchen twine and submerge in the wine. Steep in a cool place for 1 to 2 hours, no longer.
3. Remove the leaves and discard. Taste, sweeten if needed, and float the strawberries on top.
4. Serve cold in small glasses.

Coumarin in aged or overdried woodruff can be harmful in quantity – use freshly wilted leaves only, steep briefly, and treat as a seasonal drink, not a daily one.

Sources: Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (1954) · RHS species note: Galium odoratum

The Weekend Walk

Meadow Life

If you want to know what a wildflower meadow in May actually has in it, you have to get down low. Find a real meadow – not a municipal wildflower strip – and go on a dry afternoon when the insects are flying. Stand at the edge first; the butterflies will be visible from there, and you can see where they are densest. That is where you are going.

Move in slowly and get down as low as you can bear. At ground level the meadow is a different country: yellow rattle, red clover, and bird’s-foot trefoil at eye level, hoverflies on the flower heads, ground beetles in the shadows beneath the grass stems. Look up into the branches of any old tree at the meadow edge. Usnea, the grey-green beard lichen that hangs in long threads from old wood, is a monitor of clean air; its absence on a tree that used to bear it is evidence of pollution where none is visible. Folks in Devon called it Old Man’s Beard. Worth looking for this weekend, while the light is long enough to lie down in the grass and not feel cold doing it.

Sources: Plantlife: meadows in May · Natural History Museum: what lichens tell us about toxic air

An Old Word for It

May. The old English name for hawthorn blossom, surviving in the proverb “ne’er cast a clout till may be out” – which is not advice about the calendar month but about the flowering of the hawthorn itself. The phrase is a pre-Industrial weather marker: until the hedges are white, the cold is not done with you. Worth knowing this week, with the may out at full strength.

In Good Report

The migration of the nightingale is one of the longest of any British songbird: two thousand miles from the forests of West Africa to the scrub of southern and eastern England, arriving in mid April and singing through May. The species has lost ninety percent of its UK population since the 1970s and is now restricted to a wedge running south and east from the Severn estuary. The news from the RSPB at the end of April was, on that backdrop, worth passing on. Surveys across the reserves recorded 176 singing males this spring, the second-highest count in over a decade and a rise of 8.9% on the ten-year average. The largest population is at Northward Hill in Kent, where 47 singing males are now holding territory in former arable land returned to dense woodland and scrub. Canvey Wick in Essex has reported a similar lift. Alan Johnson, the RSPB England Area Manager, credits the recovery to careful coppicing and the cultivation of low-growing scrub – which is, by no coincidence, the same habitat the hedges in this week’s issue produce when they are allowed to thicken at the base. Nightingales sing best on still nights between dusk and three in the morning, in May and the first week of June. If you live within their range, this is the fortnight.

Sources: RSPB England press release (30 April 2026) · BTO BirdFacts: Nightingale

The Turning Wheel

What’s coming, in the next fortnight.

24 May (Sunday) – Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter and the traditional opening of the Pentecost season.

25 May (Monday) – Whit Monday, the old movable bank holiday observed until 1971 and still kept in folk custom and parish gatherings.

25 May (Monday) – The Spring Bank Holiday, fixed by statute to the last Monday in May since 1971.

Yours, until next Thursday.

Meg.