Peter Marren: Savour the spring and its small mercies in troubled times

Mother's Day this year has coincided with the first full flush of wild flowers. The shiny yellow stars of the celandines on the verges have been joined by the blazing suns of the first dandelions. The wood-violets are peeping shyly from the shelter of their heart-shaped leaves, and the extraordinary pink, leafless pagodas of the butterbur have rocketed up beneath the sprouting willows, apparently overnight. More than most years this spring justifies the name. The flowers seem to have sprung from the ground as if fuelled by propellant rather than sap. Twigs are springing from dormant stumps, and the buds are snapping open by the minute. This spring is a "leap" year.

I was tempted to present Mummy with a wild bunch this year, a personally gathered confection of sweet violets, celandines and marsh marigolds (which we were brought up to call "marsh mallows"). I desisted, partly because it seemed a mean gesture to respond to nature's paint-box by stealing the paint, but mainly because wild flowers never look any good indoors, torn from their setting. Allotment-grown scented violets were once, I gather, sold in little ribboned bunches for traditional mums. But subtlety can be misinterpreted in the language of flowers. What I did instead was to buy her a whacking great bunch from the florist, the same as last year. I don't know what half of them are, but I'm fairly certain that nature had nothing to do with it. These hothouse blooms do their job: they say "I love you, Mum", loudly and unambiguously. Mother's Day is no time to get ambiguous.

All the same, the early wild flowers of my village streets and paths are brighter and more intensely coloured than most things you find in a florist's shop. The pure golden- yellow of celandines, revealed only when the petals spread themselves wide and flat in sunshine, must be one of the brightest shades in nature. Their incredible lustre is partly their own, but it is borrowed from the sky. The flowers stare up at the sun, and follow it around from east to west, before nodding their heads and curling up for the night.

Sunlight is life to a green plant: it warms the soil and fuels the chemical conjuror's trick in which the plant turns water and air into sugar. But is there another reason why so many of our spring flowers are bright yellow? There are of course yellow flowers in midsummer, like ragwort, but as a rule they lack the brilliance and depth of colour of celandines and buttercups.

My guess is that the spring flowers are relying on colour rather than scent to attract insects. Most of them are only delicately scented. Yellow flowers among green grass provide the maximum colour contrast, but the celandine goes a stage further in adding brilliance. To an approaching fly the flowers may seem incandescent, like beacons aglow in the sea of grass. Later in the year, this doesn't matter as much as there are plenty of insects and plenty of flowers, and the effect is more like a marketplace.

But I like the idea of flowers as purveyors of a secret flame. Insect eyes do not see detail well, but with their extra register in the ultra-violet, they are sensitive to light and reflection. Perhaps to a bee, a dandelion looks like a burning oil-rig, or, perhaps nearer the mark, a neon-sign saying: "Bar and refuelling station. Enjoy!"

The warm weather of the past two weeks has been part of a consistent pattern of warming over the past 10 years. Environmental monitoring shows that frogs are spawning earlier, migrant birds like chiffchaff are now singing regularly in March, and spring flowers are appearing up to a fortnight earlier than they did 50 years ago. People sense that spring is being squeezed from both ends. A mild winter flashes into spring with the first warm sunshine, and as quickly, fizzles out into a soggy early summer.

We want to savour the spring, but it is passing too soon into summer green. We have had two wonderful weeks of sunshine at the exact moment of transition from winter dormancy to summer life. The sap is rising, the land is greening and the swallows will soon return to the barns. Small thoughts, tiny pleasures, in troubled times, but that is perhaps when we need them most.

Peter Marren is the author of 'Britain's Wild Flowers' (Poyser Natural History)