Calendar April 2015: Wood Anemone -Vigorous Windflower-

April: Wood Anemone

Windflower

(Anemone nemorosa, Buttercup family)

In April, we can see the white carpets of wood anemone in a beech woodland nearby our house.  The flower is tiny, about 4 cm diameter.  Bluebells and wild garlic are also blooming neighbouring areas at the same time.  The woodland is carpeted with white and blue flowers.  This is a stunning view, and I look forward to seeing it every year.  

I've never seen wood anemone in Japan, in my mother country.  It looks fragile with the tiny pretty white or sometimes pale pink petal-like sepals.

Another name of wood anemone is windflower.  Wood anemone usually grows in shady woodlands, protected from the wind, I thought.  But, in fact, 'It was said that the flower could open only when the wind blew upon it.', according to a book, Wild Flowers of Britain by B.D. Inglis (Nelson, 1958).  She described that wood anemone was quite sturdy in the bare woods despite the fragile looking.  The weather in the early spring can be rough and windy.  Unless it was vigorous, it wouldn't  appear in the woodland every spring today.

When searching wood anemone on the internet recently, I happened to find a website with an image of the wood anemone fairy by Cicely Mary Barker.  I remembered that I had some old copies of her fairy books.  One of them was the very book, in which the wood anemone fairy was.  As a school girl, I collected points of the sweets, of which company offered to give their customer the books of the flower fairy series for free.  Well, I had to spend my pocket money to buy the sweets.  But at that time it was quite hard to get foreign books in Japan.  Looking at the book, this was edited specially for the sweets company, but it states only 'This edition published in Japan by permission of Black & Son Ltd.' with no published year.  It is mysterious.

The  Windflower Fairy is a slender girl with long curly brown hair in a pale pink simple dress , brown butterfly wings on her back.   She holds two (white and pale pink) flowers in her arm and as if she were starting dancing when the wind blows on her.

THE SONG OF THE WINDFLOWER FAIRY

While human-folk slumber, 

The fairies espy
Stars without number
Sprinkling the sky.

The Winter's long sleeping,
Like night-time, is done;
But day-stars are leaping
To welcome the sun.

Star-like they sprinkle
The wildwood with light;
Countless they twinkle
The Windflowers white!

(Flower Fairies of the Spring, Cicely Mary Barker)

(The first of her Flower Fairies books, Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923.)


The first time I saw wood anemone in the woodland, it was late afternoon, and the flower closed the sepals and faced down to the ground, like violet.  I thought it might belong to a violet family, or a kind of fritillary.  But some time later, having found white twinkling wood anemone in the sun light, coming through the bare branches, I was surprised.  They looked quite different and very lively.

A few years ago, I was walking in the woodland in the drizzling rain.  The rain didn't reach onto the ground, but countless tiny dews were on every single petal and leaf.  It was tranquil there as if the dews had been absorbing all the sound.  The pure white flowers were twinkling on the ground.  The view in front of me was really magical, felt like in another fairy tale than CM Barker's.