Our flowers are, fortunately, still too numerous to mention separately. For those who would like a comprehensive list and have access to the Internet there is a useful database of plants listed by postcode on www.nhm.ac.uk/science/projects/fff/. That shows a remarkable total of no fewer than 374 flowering wild plants, bushes and trees in the cb9 postal area alone, including 60 annuals, 33 biennials, 179 perennials, 32 marsh or water plants and 38 trees or shrubs. Not all of these will be in Thurlow, of course, but a fair number are. Good places to look are in all the unsprayed areas: the churchyards, the river banks, the ditches and the 'waste' ground that hasn't yet been tidied up in the lanes or at field edges. If you stroll regularly from the village up the Carlton Road you can watch a nice succession of flowers, starting with the lovely display of aconites in the Old House from early January, snowdrops in the Walks in February, celandines and cowslips in the ditches from late March, primroses in April, and so on, through to the frothy meadowsweet on the banks in August.

And you can also see a grand selection of our native trees, including our solitary (and venerable) black poplar, one of only 2000 left in the British Isles, and such native hardwoods as the beech, ash, alder, willow, maple, oak, lime and cherry. Look out also for the stands of ancient oak in Trundley Wood, the mighty limes on Pound Green, the wych elms on the drive to Little Thurlow Hall which have survived both hurricanes and elm disease, the white poplars soughing in the breeze at the end of the Drift, and the horse chestnuts along the Walks. But every part of the village has its own vistas and its own natural history, all linked and interdependent. It is for a Millennium volume such as this to remind us how fragile, precious and irreplaceable all this is. We have need to be watchful, in both senses of that word: first, just literally to see and hear what there is around us in all its variety and richness; and secondly to guard it, lest we impoverish the natural world, and ourselves, in the name of material progress.

Black Poplar (Temple End Road)