Wenlock Edge: I imagine the story of this patch began with a handful of tiny corms from a bulb catalogue, planted to pop up pink each autumn. Those corms rolled out from a long history
Their name comes from the Latin cyclaminos and the Greek kuklos, meaning circle. Their story comes from warm dry forests of the Mediterranean. Their colour comes from an enduring optimism and an innocence of spirit toughing it out here in November woods. The cyclamen, much smaller than the showy potted ones in the grocers, have been in Britain since the 16th century and in this wood for more than a hundred years. They belong to the primrose family, which accounts for their irrepressible cheeriness, a pink note they strike at the end instead of the beginning of the year.
When I first found them about 20 years ago in the far corner of this little wood once used as a quarry for limekilns, the cyclamen were a single clump the size of a saucer. Since then, shaded by ash trees and hawthorns, their ivy-like leaves struggling through a thickening carpet of real ivy, the saucer-sized clump expanded into a coffee-table-sized patch, then, as it spread further, separated out into smaller pink dinner-plate islands in an ocean of glossy green.
The quarry was abandoned and there was a house here, abandoned a hundred years ago, too. Only the relics of a garden remain: a few conifers, some flowering currant bushes and the cyclamen. I imagine the story of this patch began with a handful of tiny corms from a bulb catalogue, planted to pop up pink each autumn. Those corms rolled out from a long history. Cyclamen were grown in the medieval gardens of Constantinople because they appeared so different from common flowers of the fields. The flower's circular "eye", formed by the fusing of upswept petals, peers earthward like a microscope. Its pink flushed with purple draws the human eye, especially in a season of grey skies and brown rot. Its evergreen, grey-enamelled leaves have neatness and precision. Now the cyclamen seem to belong here as much as the ash trees and, in these anxious shadows, may outlive them.
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