The hawthorn blossom by the River Wharfe is white and bright and overflowing from the tree like a foaming mug of beer. Amid all the new life of spring, it smells subversively of sex and death at the same time; an undeniably bawdy sweetness underlain by the repellent odour of trimethylamine, a compound that is also produced by rotting flesh. It is a strange, discomfiting smell, mingling desire and depravity in a way that doesn’t belong in polite company, but the hawthorn has no such inhibitions, wafting its profanity across the path as the hot sun emerges, bleaching the flowers to brilliance.
The smell may be ambivalent, but the sight of hawthorn blossom is always thrilling, so celebratory in its lavishness, like a wedding in a hedgerow. I look closely at the snowy bouquets of pearl-like buds and cupped flowers hanging from the branches; like May itself, there is too much beauty to comprehend. But the sight is not made for me – and what I see is only a part of what is really there.
The flowers have evolved over millennia to attract pollinators. I watch honeybees and bumblebees flitting urgently between the pink stamens, immersed in the intricate work of gathering nectar and pollen. I see pretty off-white petals with blushes of pink, but the bees can register ultraviolet colours, markings and patterns that are invisible to me.
Bees build up a positive electrical charge through friction in flight, which means the negatively charged pollengrains “fly” to them when they alight; there is even evidence they can sense the strength of the electrical field surrounding the flowers, helping them choose which ones to land on.
It seems absurd to wonder if the bees have anything as human as an aesthetic reaction to the flowers. But the evolution of flowering plants, so much of which is aimed at appealing to pollinators, predates us by about 70m years. The unfathomable beauty of the flowering world is, in a sense, a byproduct of insect consciousness, shaped by their minds. No wonder we struggle to comprehend it.
