Bluebells are here!

Our son was visiting from San Diego over the weekend, and our daughter came over from Wiltshire to join us for lunch at the excellent Nut Tree Inn©, which is to be found in the village of Murcott.© We were celebrating in advance our son's birthday, which falls at the end of the month, so we had a rather indulgent and excellent meal that is documented in a separate collection.

The family was well satisfied after lunch, as this photograph without the daughter© and this one without the father will show.

One of the objectives of our outing was to see if we could find bluebells in bloom yet.

We did! But we had to juggle with sunny breaks in the sometimes heavy showers. We started in a little wood on a track leading to New Arngrove Farm, quite close to Murcott. There's a romantic little lake (really just a pond), and we found many violets, but no bluebells. We then drove on to Bernwood Forest Nature Reserve. We found one or two bluebells, but no real display. As a big black cloud approached, we turned tail for the car, which we reached just in time before a downpour.

Finally, we went back to Wytham Woods, very near home, and there we found what we were looking for. After a stroll up the main track, we came on lovely banks covered with both primroses and bluebells, and then to masses of bluebells all around us, of which our main photograph gives an impression. My daughter's picture shows some of the bells in close-up.©

It looks as this is just the beginning of the flowering period, and we'll have to come back again soon.

A more extensive collection of my photographs for the day is here, as noted earlier.

I have marked with a © the photographs linked to this account of our day that are my daughter's rather than my own.