Guardian: May-time, fair season blackbirds sing a full song, if there be a scanty beam of day, sang an unknown Irish poet in what we now call the dark ages. Today, the light through the trees is as green and sour as a gooseberry. A high canopy of ash, latest to leaf and still sparse, lets sunshine and showers through to lower levels a-swamp with leaf; each one a crucible in the alchemy turning light into life.
Dark, gnarled trunks of old hawthorns have suddenly become lithe and sinuous, like shadow...