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.
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