Gardening on air #3: Painting with words

A little poetry today, written by Andrew Young, a 19th-century Scottish botanist and clergyman who is said to have seen almost every single British plant for himself: no mean feat in those days. I hadn't come across this before, but it's one of the most vivid evocations of the end of winter I've ever heard.

Last Snow

Although the snow still lingers

Heaped on the ivy's blunt, webbed fingers

And painting tree trunks on one side,

Here, in this sunlit ride, the fresh, unchristened things appear

Leaf, spathe and stem with crumbs of earth clinging to them

To show the way they came

But no flower yet to tell their name

And one green spear stabbing a dead leaf from below

Kills winter at a blow.

As heard on Poetry Please with the inimitable Roger McGough yesterday on Radio 4.