Isle of White

June 6, 2023, 7:59 am , by Richard Lutz

From Richard Lutz

This, above, is a manna ash. It’s in flower. Its fragrance is delightful: flush with late spring freshness. With scented white blooms, it comes to life early. The name refers to its sap which folks in The Olde Days thought had biblically restorative powers. The medieval doctors may have been right.. its sugary extract can be used for eye diseases and digestive ailments.

There seems to be alot of whiteness in early June. In fact, this is the season of white.

There’s the 10 foot high climbing hydrangea crawling up a back wall:

It’s taken three years to root and then…WHAM…it never stopped growing. Each year I have to shakily climb a ladder, reach up and cut it back, thin it out.

Another spring white flower: a hop skip and shovel away from the non stop hydrangea is a healthy pryacantha weighing heavily on a trestle that hides the bulk of my oil tank:

It too needs a heavy pruning once the blooms fade.

And then there’s the cistus, also called rock rose, happy as it turns to the sun:

Up on the hills, white hawthorn lines paths and trails:

It’s everywhere and sometimes the white blossoms turn to pink. It’s found even high up on the hilly sections of the Ayrshire Coastal Path. The trail dips down to Currarie Port, an old harbour where tobacco, rum and tea were smuggled into Scotland way back when:

More recently, it became the connecting point for a 40 mile heavy duty underwater electrical cable between the mainland and Northern Ireland. Tucked away, the quiet notch cossets a remnant of colder days, a white primrose- still thriving- shielded by knarls of rock and grassy knolls:

This season of white will offer up another blossom in July. It’s meadowsweet which, as you’d expect, grows in the meadows. Its deep fragrance is heady stuff:

And its scent is reminiscent of the fragrance of that manna ash. Odd that… there’s no scientific link between the two. Except for their similar deep perfume, an aroma so softly luxuriant that Middle Age folks gathered meadowsweet to scent their homes and cover their floors, from the most meagre of hovels to the Tudor palaces of Queen Elizabeth. A radically different welcome though for the white flowered hawthorn. It was banned from crossing a doorway. It presaged illness, death, doom.
.