spring

I went to Unravel at the Barbican this week and started writing a newsletter about the exhibition and the thoughts it provoked. I didn’t enjoy it (understatement) and it didn’t engender the lightest of thoughts, so I’ve decided to park it for a week and fall back on something lovely, beautiful, uplifting, reliably colourful, and springlike. What with it being a four-day weekend, and us having a house full of Brockets, and chocolate, baking, buns, and all, as Holden Caulfield might say.

So tulips it is, then, in a weirdly early season.

Our tulips are tall and strong and healthy this year, which makes every trip to the allotment very exciting. There have been times in the last few years when we’ve had huge bare patches and no idea where the bulbs went, incursions by animals who leave neat prints on the beds, cases of tulip fire, and too many short, stubby flowers. But this spring, we have lovely, classic, just-how-you-imagine-them-to-be tulips which remind me all over again why they are my favourite flowers. We’ve even got parrots out already, a first for March.

We are growing our tulips as annuals, so we don’t plant the bulbs very deeply, and we pull up everything, bulb and all, when we pick and compost the lot. This helps avoid the spread of tulip fire, but it’s also because the bulbs are spent after one glorious show, and it’s a lot of faff lifting, drying, storing, and replanting them for very little return (not to mention the possibility of attracting rodents in the shed which we can’t lock anyway because vandals keep breaking into the sheds at the allotments and taking tools and stuff and we don’t get a new lock because they will just try harder to get in or maybe even set fire to it which is what happened to our three neighbours’ sheds a while ago. (Yes, it all goes on over there.)

[perfect timing for Easter clichés, with even a pasque flower in the background]

At the Fitzwilliam last week to make up for the disappointing Blake exhibition (don’t ask), I sought out my favourite C17 and C18 Dutch flower paintings and my favourite Koryo celadon ceramics from Korea (very old, the epitome of elegant simplicity). Despite adoring tulips, I’m not a huge fan of them in paintings, on wallpaper and fabrics, and would definitely not have a tulip tattoo (the idea just popped unbidden into my head, so I had a quick Google and sure enough there are whole Pinterest pages devoted to tulips on forearms, shoulders, heels, calves etc. Wow.) But I do love a madly extravagant Dutch floral arrangement with a mash-up of spring, summer, and autumn flowers and fruits with the incredible broken tulips which caused the mania.

[‘Irises and Tulips’ (1950s), Cedric Morris]

Elsewhere, I like the way Duncan Grant captures the blowsiness and theatricality of huge, open parrot tulips, and Mark Gertler’s intensity is expressed in tulips of vivid colours and almost wax-work stillness, while Cedric Morris’ plantsman’s tastes result in gloriously vibrant and crowded paintings and these are the ones I’d happily have on my walls.

[‘Lilacs and Tulips’ (1943), Ethel Gabain]

But I am also drawn to the chalky, pastel arrangement in Ethel Gabain’s painting. It’s as though she’s put an “grey spring day in England” filter on, rendering it delicate and very beautiful.

In other seasonal activities, I went to a workshop to learn how to weave a nest. I’m no ornithologist, and although I would like to be able to identify more birds, I am mostly fascinated by the way different birds build their different types of nests according to location and available materials. I’m amazed by their sheer skill and ingenuity, and the designs which are the subject of much debate: does a particular bird build with a specific design and end-result in mind, or is it all intuition? I came across these questions which tbh had never occurred to me in a lovely book by an ornithologist father and artist/sculptor son which has some of the best, most evocative writing about nests as sculptural objects. In A Natural History of Nest Building Andy Holden describes a blackbird’s nest as ‘simultaneously precarious and ephemeral, yet also an image of security; an image of cosmic confidence in an arboreal world’, and rooks’ nests in leafless November trees like ‘scribbles over the lines of a colouring book’.

[Pussy Willow Bowl (2004), Lizzie Farey]

My nests are very much man-made using birch twigs. Nevertheless, I had to plan them, give them structural integrity, and fill them out so that any eggs wouldn’t fall through. I love Joe Hogan’s nests and Lizzie Farey’s bowls which have the ends of twigs spiralling out of the edge, like a whirlwind or a scatty woodpigeon’s ‘entanglement of notches’. So I left mine as explosions, and although I didn’t intend them to be Easter nests, they were immediately filled with real and chocolate eggs by the grown-up children (ie everyone) in the house.

[Scala Theatre in March 1964 during filming of ‘Hard Day’s Night’]

And now, having come across this photo, as a wholesome Easter weekend activity I feel we should all paint eggs with Beatles faces and hair on them to go in the nest.

And there are hot no-cross buns, made using the usual Dan Lepard Baking with Passion recipe, although here the book would be called Eating with Passion.

Happy Sunday!