Minding our wildflowers

That estimable survivor of the showband era, Big Tom McBride from Co Monaghan, once had a hit about an old-fashioned Irish mother “in the fields where the wildflowers grow’’.

That was about 40 years ago and, just like the gentle mother in that maudlin song, some of the wildflowers have also gone.

But many still remain. Soon, bluebells, early and welcome harbingers of summer will be shooting up from the woodland floor. By May, many people’s favourite month, they will be seen in profusion bending before the warm breezes that month usually brings. Bluebells and buttercups were among the flowers we picked in the fields for the May altars of long ago.