The First Flowers Are Out At Calcutt Marina

Snowdrops at Calcutt Boats Locks Marina

It’s been a long, hard winter. At least it’s felt that way. With the uncharacteristically cold six week spell of sub zero days and bitterly cold nights between the end of November and the beginning of January, winter has dragged on, and on, and on. I can see light at the end of the tunnel now though. The first of the spring flowers are in bloom.

Calcutt Boats site is a marvellous place to be in the spring and early summer. We have three SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) wild flower meadows. They are three of the richest wild flower meadows in Warwickshire and they are stunning.

We kick off in February with snowdrops followed a few weeks later by beautiful yellow daffodils. There are hundreds of them around the site… but not as many as there are cowslips. We have tens of thousands. Thick yellow carpets of them along the roadsides, on the footpaths, on the banks surrounding Meadows marina. They’re everywhere and they are stunning. And they nestle for a place in a sea of oxeye daisies.

There are wild flowers everywhere. Common knapweed, lady’s bedstraw, betony, devil’s bit scabious, saw wort, drop wort, pepper saxifrage, great burnet and adder’s tongue. There are a dozen or so other wild flower species on the site whose names escape me at the moment plus a mixture of cultivated flowers run wild. All of these flowers nestle among the seventeen species of grass that our spring-time sheep and lambs love so much.

What a wonderful place to live and work.