If we asked the earth to soften and break, summoned the sun to rise and hold, and then asked every tree and flower to stand and deliver Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, spring would result. Unlike summer's overladen bow to its own fecundity, spring is bright, punchy, and proud and demands we sit up and notice.

A few years ago Poet Laureate Simon Armitage (born May 26, 1963) travelled around Britain to "blossom sites" where blossoms - planted or wild - thrived and shone. He created a series of poems that abide by the adage that poets speak what must be spoken. Blossomize is a celebration of the ineluctable warming, softening, and many-petaled abundance that is spring, that js blossomizing.

The Spectators

Super-excited kids called us out of the house to see the parade arrive. It was spring, strolling forward across the earth’s surface at carnival pace, at the pace of a travelling fair. The highlight: blossom trees in fancy dress – some as candelabras, some as chandeliers, some in fright wigs, some as manic pierrots throwing sugared almonds and cherry lips into the streets. Time dazzled like a soft blizzard. There were no choirs but choirs were singing.

The convoy of floats passed through the postcodes and over the wooded hills, rolling south to north. Greenness followed, then a long slow season of lost bees trying the wrong doors, and old fruit oozing with syrup and glue. Then rust set in, and the stark bareness of worlds to come. There was no bell, but a bell was rung.

In Armitage's prose "The Spectators," a bell was rung, like a parade or the arrival of something—a queen, a prince, a flowering tree. The blossom is a sublime appointment, feted and cheered, encouraged to survive and thrive and multiply.

Magnolia, London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The state of blossoming in Britain (and let's just assume just about every other country) has been disastrous in its steady decline. Each year the blossomers are fewer and fewer and all the species that rely on them equally decline. On the sides of the road, small, hopeful plantings are all blossoming, but they are nothing to the arboreal slaughter everywhere else to facilitate more cars on more roads all the time. No wonder these trees no longer grow among their kin, but among ours.

Plum Tree Among the Skyscrapers

She's travelled for years
through tangled forests
and formal gardens,
edged along hedgerows,
set up her stall
on tenanted farms
then moved on, restless,
empty handed sometimes,
sometimes with fruit
in her arms.

What an ostensibly delicious idea —a tree moving along the spaces we've carved out, the spaces between humans. We've spread out this massive concrete and iron picnic blanket to protect us from the earth and here come blossoms, throwing their seeds and taking root. Is anything really wild anymore? 

The wild cherry tree
dumped me, then brought me flowers,
then dumped me again.

Dancing Cherry, London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

I never considered fruit trees even having seeds, not as readily as other trees. The fruit has the seeds, the tree has the fruit. If someone asked you to imagine the seeds of an apple tree or the seeds of an oak, which one would immediately come to mind and which would linger, buried under the other distractions of the tree?

Except, of course, the seeds are what inevitably get dressed in blossom. Each blossom that flounces and twirls for the world to see begins with the plucky initiative of a seed.

And back to the city, back to the integration of love and light and industrialisation.

Old Jaguar parked
under apple blossom tree
becomes snow leopard.

Redbuds, London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

If only blossoms and metal and sun could coexist without one diminishing the other. If only they could harmonise. Is it possible to read anything about nature and not feel melancholy? Because we know it will end and we cannot separate its death from its beauty?

The Seasons

How many summers
up ahead?  

How many autumns
in his hand?  

How many winters
on her mind?  

How many Easters
still to come?  

How many detours
round the lake,  

how many circuits
will they make

to see the hedgerows
 veiled in lace?

"While they insist we take notice," Armitage muses, "In its melancholy transience, blossom also tells us something about the cycle of life, being a metaphor for our finite existence." The solution is more beauty, more springs, more nature, more blossom—every single year as long as we can. Read spring's false starts and fits, its relentless march into beauty and a sustainable approach to eating its bounty and a hearty jaunt right through its core.

The illustrations and cover of Armitage's book Blossomize were done by Angela Harding, a magnificent printmaker who has published her own artistic response to nature's beauty and bounty.