Bluebell wood, Lanhydrock Garden
Photo by Melanie Nakisa

A woodland that typifies the beauty of an English spring. A bluebell wood is a wood that in spring-time has a carpet of bluebells underneath a newly forming leaf canopy.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the romantic poets, was very keen on the plant as revealed by these lines of his poem "May Magnificat":

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
In his journal entry for May 9, 1871 Hopkins says:

In the little wood opposite the light they stood in blackish spreads
or sheddings like spots on a snake.  The heads are then like thongs
and solemn in grain and grape-colour.  But in the clough through the
light they come in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks
of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical
themselves and the young grass and brake-fern combed vertical, but
the brake struck the upright of all this with winged transomes.  It
was a lovely sight. - The bluebells in your hand baffle you with
their inscape, made to every sense.  If you draw your fingers through
them they are lodged and struggle with a shock of wet heads; the long
stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another like your
fingers themselves would when you passed the palms hard across one
another, making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of a hurdle
strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and
in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them.