Country diary: dazzled by the common's treasure

A generous-hearted fellow country diarist, a native of Biggleswade, tipped me off at the beginning of the month to the whereabouts of treasure on the county’s largest common.

Biggleswade Common has form: at the turn of the millennium, a detectorist unearthed a gold Saxon coin there that fetched a third of a million pounds at auction. Dawn Lawrence sent me in search of more riches, with precise instructions that took me across the road from the bulk of the common to an offshoot of the meadows that I had not even realised was open public land.

A week after my first visit, I swung back the kissing gate to find this newly discovered meadow both unchanged and transformed. Even though it was still a dazzling sight, the yellow remembered sea of buttercups seemed more unevenly spread: they were absent from the damp hollow of an ancient dew pond, absent from the raised mounds of anthills past and present, and inexplicably scarce or abundant elsewhere.

Each buttercup was a determined sunseeker, tilting its head at a precise angle to catch its rays. Piercing shafts seared the insides of each bowl of petals to give them a molten heart.

The tubular flowers of cowslips had shrunk, hermit-crab-like, into their seedheads, whereas mats of speedwell glowed blue and brilliant. Understated, umbelliferous pignut was more evident than before, and so too its understorey of near-prostrate field woodrush. Random drifts of meadow saxifrage on the slopes and dips caught my eye with their snow-white, pleasingly rounded petals. Low-crowned common daisies are white-petalled too, but only in our imagination – within that galaxy of wild flowers, they showed off the exquisite extra detail of petal tips dipped in lipstick pink. Whitest and brightest of all, by dint of sheer quantity, were the may blossoms, tumbling out of the scattered hawthorn bushes, spray on spray sending heady wafts of vanilla scent into the air.

During the intervening week, a small herd of bullocks had been brought on to graze the common. I found them bunched nervously in and around the stream at the very back, cowering behind the bushes as if afraid to show their doleful faces. But for them, this would be a salad-filled summer.

from Environment | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2s9vzvg
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