Bluebells

I thought about going to Ricardo Maceiras' workshop at Negracha, I would have liked to, I'm sorry to miss him, I felt I ought to go, but it was such a lovely day.

There are thousands and thousands of daisies in the grass. At the foot of an oak just off the main road were three different kinds of bluebells; the exquisite, drooping, purplish English kind, endemic to this island, and not yet quite extinct; the paler, bouncing jazz-trumpet Spaniards, gradually taking over; and the frilly-looking hybrids pointing everywhere. In Epping forest I saw more of the first kind, in a cloud under a beech tree. The oaks are in full leaf, but with young leaves of a brilliant green. The giant horse-chestnuts are blooming, the hawthorns are covered in an avalanche of flowers, and I stopped to look at a dog-rose ten feet tall.

I measured a large oak tree, growing in open ground, with my arms. It was three spans, less my right hand and two joints of my left little finger, which makes it 466cm around. According to this chart, that makes it 240, from an acorn that fell about half way between 1715 and 1815.