Flower Seasons

May 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, St. Walpurga, May Day, and Mary's Day.

Last evening, we celebrated St. Walpurgis's Eve with a romp on the beach.  Afon ran straight for the cold waves, shoes, socks, trousers, and all.  I had to run in after him (shoes, socks, trousers and all) but he was not dismayed.  Until later, when he realized how uncomfortable it was to be wet, even on a mild evening in spring.

When the tide is out, the rocks are things of beauty, and for all the white-sugar sand of the Gulf coast of Florida, it doesn't touch the raw, remote, mineral beauty of the Irish sea.  Pebbles are worn smooth and creamy from the patient centuries.  It's a hard kind of thing to capture with a camera, so I'm glad I left it behind this once and enjoyed being in it.  The beauty of the Welsh seashore is a dimensional thing; it's in the atmosphere, a haziness that color and line and form can't quite capture.  The mussels sprout like so many blossoms on the jagged rocks.

I've always counted the seasons of Wales in flowers.  The sign of winter's waning is marked by the coming of the snowdrops.  We arrived in March, just in time for the daffodils.  They're season fades for the time of the bluebells, and they are even more numerous than Saint David's flower.  Soon the hydrangeas will harken the summer.

But there are many, many flowers here, the apple blossoms, tulips, dogwood, and primroses.  I think this is a Kazan Flowering Cherry.  They appear in lush poms and snow torrents of true-pink petals.  The trees are here and there in Colwyn Bay, but this one is at the entrance to Tan-Y-Coed gardens along the Old Colwyn river.