#a e housman

It was Easter time at last, and spring was advancing with its magical, unstoppable force, even in the wild west Highlands of Scotland. The weather was uncomfortably cool, wet and windy, but the more it rained, the faster spring leaped forward, and Algy observed that his assistants’ garden was bursting into life at a remarkably rapid rate.

Algy’s strange wee friend, the little green dragon, had never seen a spectacle of this kind before and was glowing at a varying speed in perplexity, while Algy himself - who had witnessed the same miracle each year - found that he was astonished and thrilled anew by the incredible transformation. Of all the blossom and flowers in April he especially loved the beautiful white cherries, which despite the inhospitable climate rarely failed to bloom in all their glory.

So from his perch in a windswept cherry tree, Algy wishes you all a very Happy Easter, and hopes that whether you are twenty or seventy, or fifteen or fifty or ninety-five, you will pause and take time to “look at things in bloom” and delight in the wonderful blossoming of spring:

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 springs 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.

[Algy is quoting the poem Loveliest of trees from the collection A Shropshire Lad by the late 19th century/early 20th century English poet and classical scholar A E Housman.]