A Peek into an English Bluebell Wood

Bluebells woods have a mysterious air. To get the full effect, you have to imagine everything moving in the lightest breeze, bees humming in the bells, birds singing as they attend their nests, and the odd grey squirrel bouncing around.

Light dapples through the tender young beech and chestnut leaves, moving across one patch then another; brightening or fading as clouds float between the woodland and the sun.

Beech is the most beautiful tree at this time of year.

In case you’re (rightly) thinking I ought not to have been trampling the bluebells, I didn’t: the woods are laced with paths, broad, ‘ordinary’ ones and many more secret or narrow ones. Some are more suited to foxes or deer than humans, others are wet, more river than path.

Since my pictures of the beech tree leaves and the bluebells are on the impressionistic side, you might like to see the nodding stalks of dancing bells closer up:

I’m sharing these so Mum can look inside the woods: she was saying this weekend that her bluebell wood-rambling days are over and she just has to imagine they are still much as they were.