Rain has darkened the earth of arable fields sown with barley and refreshed pastures occupied by ewes with lambs or suckler cows just turned out of winter quarters with their calves. Primroses deck the sides of lanes towards riverside quays and grow thickly on steep slopes untouched by agricultural chemicals and fertiliser. Blackthorn blossom foams along the sides of shorn hedgerows but grows unchecked with willow catkins and flowering gorse bushes in neglected thickets which shelter the returned chiffchaff and blackcap.
On roadside banks, overlooking the eucalyptus groves and polytunnels of market gardens at Boetheric and Burraton, daffodils faded before the end of March and now sprawl between the umbels of alexander. Throughout the parish, remnants of old-fashioned narcissi give clues to the location of defunct market gardens and orchards. Near Corneal, hardy survivors like the slender Princep (resembling a wild daffodil that we have seen in mountainous regions of Spain) grow in hedges around stock and arable fields.
Clumps of Brilliancy and the short-stemmed double Van Sion survive along the course of a proposed railway between Callington and Saltash. It was never built but the designated strip of land, now incorporated into a roadside verge, was cultivated in the 1950s when growers in the parish sent off boxes of early flowers to London, Midland and northern markets. A few original plots of single-variety narcissus survive, mostly in steep, regenerated deciduous woodland where the owners occasionally cut back invading brambles. Rows of bedraggled white lady grow in the oak copse below the iron age remains. The perfumed, white-petalled flowers of actaea, horace and ornatus used to be a good source of income around Easter and they still flower every year among the dog's mercury, emerging ferns and bluebells.