Going down to Kew in daffodil time

When spring finally reached London after those Arctic weeks with the bitter wind from the east, I hurried out to Kew to see what was happening to Nature. And there it all was: millions of daffodils in massed marching ranks, spreading golden carpets between the still bare specimen trees. The crocuses broke ‘like fire’ at my feet, as Tennyson says, and the magnolia blossoms were bursting on the trees with all the pent-up energy stored during the long, cold winter months: an extravaganza in ivory.