The wild cherry trees (Prunus avium) in Brede High Woods are in full bloom now, but it is a very fleeting event.
Such a brief burst of beauty is always, somehow, tinged with sadness, with the idea of the fleetingness of things nowhere better expressed than in A. E. Housman's untitled poem:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
