THIS is the season for wild blue lupins, followed by mauve rosebay willow-herb. Stewart Conn, Edinburgh’s first official Makar, saw them in the context of social and economic change when penning this poem from his collection Stolen Light (Bloodaxe Books, 1999, £9.95).

WILD FLOWERS

I didn’t know lupinus polyphyllus as such, in those days:

simply that our manse garden was rampant with displays

of varying blue; nor that this converging in colour

of massed spikes, year after year, was a reverting to nature.

Oblivious, we lay in their ribbed and scented dens,

bees blundering by, under clouds of chiffon. As intense

were the stained-glass windows we gazed at on Sundays,

the congregation dwindling – successive generations

~

heading for housing schemes, but still the appeals

for the fabric fund, the carillon of bells;

the burden ever greater, for fewer to bear.

Compare epilobium angustifolium, similarly

tall-stemmed, but a looser, fluffier flower,

its mauve spires pointed out by my mother

when we went for runs in the family car, till we’d cry

‘Guess what, rosebay willow-herb!’ Found mainly

on disused railways, it proliferates where factories were;

reminder of jobs lost, of bitterness and despair.

In abundance willow-herb and lupin demonstrate

the slow dereliction of Church and State.