Nothing beats the sight of bluebells en masse. I was brought up in Kent and I can well remember the woods carpeted in bluebells. Here, we just get a few straggly ones!
Lovely picture, we have them growing all along the grass verges here. As a child I was not allowed to bring bluebells into the house as my mother said they would bring bad luck , same thing for hawthorn/may blossom and Lilac
I don't remember being told any flowers would bring bad luck, though I can remember we children believed that if you picked dandelion flowers you would wet the bed. And my father thought it amusing to tell me that if I swallowed an apple or orange pip I would have a tree growing inside me - I was quite scared!
"Pee the bed" or as the French would call them "pissenlit". This might interest you: http://www.plant-lore.com/235/dandelion/
What an interesting article! We were much too respectable to call them 'pee the bed' of course! And although we wouldn't dream of picking the yellow flowers, we were quite happy to pick the seed heads to blow and tell the time. I give young dandelion leaves to my Cockatiel, and quite enjoy dandelion tea (from a packet, not home-brewed) though my favourite is nettle tea. Some of us learned how to pick nettles without getting stung and would chase the others with them.
And swallowing chewing gum would block up your b*m! Merry has been eating dandelion flowers recently. I keep telling her that it is not a wise thing for a leaky hound to do, but she doesn't take any notice.
Luckily I wasn't told that one, or I'd have been looking for piles of dung to stand on! Anyone else remember people going out with their shovels to collect horse droppings from the milkman's horse for their gardens?
Oh yes, well not personally but Father used to follow all the horse-drawn delivery carts with his shovel and bucket... ...which is probably why his fruit and vegetable garden was so productive - his rhubarb was out of this world.
Sadly, I've never seen any bluebells in Hungary, but to compensate we have lilac which is native to the country. It's in bloom at the moment and everywhere the hedges are a riot of white, lavender and purple and the air is heady with the perfume! My father used to tease me by saying I'd have been much taller if they'd put cow muck in my boots when I was younger! My grandparents lived in a house which was literally in the middle of of acres of fields. They had a very long driveway which my father insisted I walk down equipped with bucket and shovel collecting cow pats on the way. It never occurred to me to be afraid of the cows grazing in the field which bordered the drive, I think because I used be so cross with my father making me doing something I hated! My grandparents house had no mains water, gas or electricity and no bathroom. As a young child I used to be fascinated with the outside khazi because it was a "two seater" and had neatly cut up pieces of newspaper hanging from a hook instead of proper toilet paper. I used to spend hours sitting in there taking the newspaper cuttings off the hook and reading them, much to my grandpa's annoyance!
Not as spectacular as Beagles in the Bluebells. Along the old railway track today, we had Champions among the Campions. (OK, a bit of wishful thinking there!)
