This joyful little poem has been jangling around my head for the past few weeks:
'Loveliest of Trees'
A.E. Housman (St John's, 1877)
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
The pictures were all taken on Easter Monday at Mount Ephraim Gardens in Kent. They're not all cherry trees but they are, like everything else in England this month, things in bloom.
