Is love so prone to change and rot/ We are fain to rear forget-me-not/ By measure in a garden plot?” asked Christina Rossetti (A Bed of Forget-Me-Nots, 1856). The flowers of forget-me-not, Myosotis, may have been reared by measure in a garden plot here, before it was abandoned a hundred years ago and a wood of change, rot and indeed love took over.
Water, creeping, pale, tufted, Jersey, wood, alpine, field, changing and early … forget-me-nots are species of Myosotis belonging to the borage family, famous for their blue flowers; the delicate pale blue of forget-me-not is unique. Some flowers on this plant growing along the path are a brilliant white, too.
There’s a windthrow hawthorn broken by last winter and someone sat on it to rest. Did their eye alight on these flowers and did the forget-me-nots awaken a memory of Rossetti’s “passion of the instinctive pulse”? Whoever it was left three mint crème wrappers and bits of a disposable razor.
Sky blue is a good colour for remembrance. Although there’s not much of it today and the sky is cool and dishwater grey, the flowers are the colour of the far blue yonder, AE Housman’s “blue remembered hills”, into the blue, the beyond, a spiritual eternity. At its heart, the forget-me-not is golden, the merest glimmer, not secretive like cowslip, brazen like dandelions or greedy like fields of oilseed rape that spread along the Edge and into the west like gold leaf papering an ugly idol. The gold in the blue of Myosotis is the glow of a memory, “Love steadfast as a fixed star”.
These forget-me-nots remember the limestone grassland here before the young ash trees; they remember the quarry and limekilns before that, and a much older wood before that, too. They remember the garden of a little house and together with flowering currants and fading daffodils are all that remain of it.
How far does the memory of whoever sat on the fallen tree go back; what do they remember? Do they remember love and how, as Rossetti said, it can’t be taught or controlled, “So free must be forget-me-not.”
