Globetrotters Monthly Challenge | April Flowers

A Daisy Chain Of Beautiful Places

Wildflowers through the eyes of a romantic traveller

If you grew up in a city, or even a town, your experience of wildflowers might be limited. You probably didn’t call them wildflowers, you probably called them weeds.

Except for the daisies.

Sitting on the lawn as my mum hung up the washing, watching my grandfather fixing a truck, and carefully making a hole in the stem of each daisy with the nail of my little thumb. Threading the daisies together to make a crown for a princess. The daisies with the pink tips on the petals were the best jewels.

Then I grew and forgot about wildflowers for a while.

The Cotswolds

In my twenties, I lived in Gloucestershire, one of the most picturesque of all English counties, with an unbelievable diversity and beauty of wildflowers. I wrote about it here:

The Stroud Valleys of Gloucestershire are that less visited part of the Cotswolds where all that red woollen cloth for the old British Army uniforms was historically made. The pin-hooked heads of the teasel flowers (like the one in the picture with the bee below ) were used to brush the wool felt to make the nap stand up. I love that its legacy can still be seen in the number of teasels found in the area, loved not just by bees, but by butterflies and finches too.

The Cotswolds area is a beautiful and popular place to visit, but on your trip to Bourton-On-The-Water or to see Clarkson’s Farm, take some time to observe the abundant wildflowers in the fields, ditches and hedgerows.

When I’m travelling, I love to discover wildflowers. Two places, in particular, are special to me.

Monte Baldo

Is there anything more beautiful than an alpine meadow? The air is so clean and the views stretch forever. When visiting Malcesine, on Lake Garda, Italy, I took a trip up to the top of Monte Baldo, which rises steeply behind the village.

I’m not sure what I expected to find there (apart from the alpaca farm!), but the mountain was covered in wildflowers. It was so peaceful sitting on top of the mountain in the short grass, with sheep grazing around.

I think all that sheep poop must be good for the flowers! There was a huge variety of different types, not in the grand swathes of the Californian blooms we’ve been reading about, but dotted around the whole area. Here are a few examples:

Paestum

Paestum is a world heritage site of well-preserved Greek temples to the south of the Amalfi coast. The site has an incredible sense of peace and calm. The wildlife around the site seems like it has always been there since Greco-Roman times.

A lizard basks on the wall of a temple, the stone pines cast a cool shade near the old amphitheatre, and everywhere yellow flowers pop up between the ancient stones of the roads.

I don’t recognize this flower (perhaps you do?) but I love to imagine that this flower is a millennia-old descendant of flowers that may have been turned into a crown for a princess by a little ancient Greek girl as she watched her mother hang the washing.

Read about the Californian blooms in these articles in Globetrotters by Michele Maize and Jerry Dwyer

Do you like travel, food, style and culture? Follow my account to read more. To access millions of other great articles by talented and famous writers, you can sign up to become a Medium Member!

You can also sign up for my newsletter here, so you get my stories straight into your inbox before everyone else!

Follow me on Instagram