Isn't this the time when the Three Ice Maidens come to scatter all those optimistic, lyrical invocations of the arrival of summer? You look around and see, said a friend, that the oak's host of dangling flowers has now been enveloped in delicate, light green leaves, soon to be full size. You see the arbutus, he goes on, with the fruit nearing the size of cherries; and the plum cherry tree itself has a good crop. The limes, about fifteen feet high and already a fine sturdy shape, and clothed to the ground in leaf. Even the quinces have set more flowers than ever.
Which means nothing. But still. Be thankful.
The fact that the cleevers, the ground elder or bishopweed, the invincible, and other unwanted plants are flourishing, has to be recorded too.
But the old saw about the oak coming out before the ash means that we will have a splash, while, the ash, showing before the oak foretells a soak, is nonsense.
With every oak around you now well on its green and flowery way, there is hardly a stir from the ash in any quarter. And isn't it the same every year? Did the ash (the mountain ash or rowan is quite a different tree) ever come out before the oak?
But back to the Ice Maidens.
A couple of years ago, these deadly (usually three) days of cold, struck a beech of some twelve feet or more, high, and well rooted, and turned every leaf of it black.
Not withered, not shrivelled. Just black as they grew on the branch. Don't grumble. There will be an end to their visitation.
Maybe there will only be two or even one of these Ice Maidens, but come it does.
And here, remind all as usual, that in the second World War, when weather reports were censored, there was a foot of snow on the Curragh in the first ten or so days of May?
So let us go back to Thomas Hardy:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
He was a man who used to notice such things?
Be positive. The delicate green is so easy on the eye and cooling to the mind. The Ice Maidens do not stay long.