bluebells

The bluebells in the wood have opened.  It seems to me that they are early this year.  I'm sure that bluebell open days around here are normally held in early May.  A few years ago we went on holiday to Cornwall at almost exactly this time, from around 18th to 25th April, and on the last day we went to Enys, a very old, beautiful and decayed garden with a benign microclimate, famous for its bluebells, and were too early for the main display, instead just getting a tantalising hint of what it would be like in a few days, when we were back in Essex.

Anyway, the bluebells are lovely and I'm pleased to see them, early or late.  They are the native English bluebells, with flowers down one side of the nodding spikes.  The intensity of blue of a large bluebell wood is like nothing else.  Ours is not that large, and the bluebells are very particular about where they will and won't grow, so patches of blue erupt here and there where the ground conditions are precisely to their liking.

The bulbs go very deep, and are difficult to lift.  It is illegal to take bluebells from the wild anyway, but as the landowner I was trying to remove them from the line of the path and reuse them in the meadow.  They were having none of it.  The leaves will not stand trampling, so you need a path through your bluebell wood to go and look at them without treading on them.

Bluebells in Essex are strongly associated with ancient woodland (technically, woodland that has been there continuously since 1600 at the latest, though the wood may be much older than that), but in some parts of the UK bluebells aren't markers of ancient woodland.  Our little wood divides into two sections, the alder carr which I've tracked on maps back to the 1730s and is presumed ancient, and the northern section which reverted from farmland in the last century.  The bluebells stop short at the edge of the old part, and show no inclination to travel further.  I have read how this is because they lack a good seed dispersal mechanism, and find it difficult to spread.

Now this is very puzzling, because they do pop up in the garden, in the most unexpected places.  There are several thriving clumps in the gravel, under the boughs of a crab apple, and some in the borders.  Richard Mabey suggests in Flora Britannica that patches of bluebells in the countryside can show where a wood once stood, but the garden has been farmland since at least the 1730s, and is definitely not the remains of ancient woodland.  Some of the places they have chosen to live are very dry and arid and not at all similar to woodland soil.  They seem to like the company of a shrub.  Or else their seed dispersal mechanism is that some bird eats the seeds then craps while perching.  They look a bit random and unthemed growing wherever they choose of their own sweet will, but I don't mind them.  I've heard other things about bluebells.  They need shade.  They don't need shade, but hate grass, so thrive in light shade which suppresses the grass.  But I've seen them growing in grass too.  Heavy shade reduces flowering, and they persist in a leafy state multiplying by division only, which is why coppicing woodland is good for improving the bluebell display, by letting the light in.