It’s almost Eden on the coast this month. The neighborhood festooned with flowers as all the until-now anonymous vegetation abruptly realizes that May may be their only chance to thank their sponsors: sun and rain and soil. Walking to the Cove the eye is pulled down hitherto unnoticed view-lines by the splash of colour: there, and there, and another one just there.

Wisteria, and more wisteria, the blossoms draped along fences, the end-walls of every other house clouded with the faded purple clusters, like ghost-grapes drained of wine.

And clematis: the boughs of one skyscraping conifer cloaked in a thick five-pink-petalled tapestry. Like a floral shawl draped on shoulders, a garment which has steadily been creeping, branch by branch and year by year towards the sky.

In our small yard we have a purple-petalled strain which grows against the house. It foams up towards the eaves in search of sun and hides a robin’s nest, tucked in where the drainspout meets the siding. An anxious young-maternal robin sits bright-eyed on it, prepared (twitch! twitch!) to kamikaze-dive-bomb me if I come too close.

And laburnum! A ziggurat of laburnum everywhere! Hanging Babylonian gardens of laburnum blossom on every corner! Heaps of the pendant yellow flowers stacked up into the overhanging ranks of cedar boughs.

And underneath it all a muted undertone of unmown grass; a scattering of buttercups; the gauze of dandelions gone to seed.

Walking back along the untended paths, an almost-Adam and an almost-Eve, we fill our hands with tiny points of flowering-weedy light: violet, and pink and blue — and scatter them in vasefuls through the house like candles.