The Sierra de Guadarrama, in June, is what wildflower dreams are made of. The towering grasses, the swathes of chamomile, the colour. Add the heat, the chirruping of the crickets and the rattle of the azure-winged magpies, and you have a full on assault on the senses- a feast where everything is abundant. This week I arrived back from 5 of the most lovely days there, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
We were particularly lucky as it was only the day before we arrived that the spring showers had stopped and the verdant valleys were still at their absolute best. In somewhere like central Spain, you only get a fleeting few weeks to see the mountain valleys as a lush landscape; and it had been quite a few years since I had managed to visit before the heat had turned the landscape into something more arid. Every day we walked among the poppies, the clusters of purple viper’s bug gloss, the tangles of vetch, the common mullein that was taller than I was. Prickly golden fleece (Urospernum, a relative of the dandelions) was growing from the scantest soil patches between the granite, and the endemic Sedum pedicellatum (an enormously cute, rubbery type of crassula) seemed to be growing out of the very rocks themselves.
I’ve written before about plant blindness, and how this blog was also slightly guilty of it. If there was anywhere that could showcase just how beautiful and interesting botany could be, this was it. More from our trip to Madrid coming up soon :).
