The camassia have risen, spearing into spring and soaring skyward to link us with the early days of summer. Their first ascending colour eclipses the last of the spring bulbs as the meadows quicken to swallow the Pheasant’s Eye narcissus. Spires that leave their fleshy foliage behind to blink one and then a succession of starry flowers. Each star lasts just a day as they fizzle up the stems, still ahead of the grasses – but not for long – to ride this pristine and to-be-savoured moment.

Camassia provide first height in a border, rising simultaneously with Thalictrum aquilegifolium and cow parsley. I have learnt a lesson or two over the years, having regretted planting the profligate Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’ in a border setting (not my own I might add, but a client’s) without having grown the plant for long enough myself to know its habits. The single form seeds into open ground if you do not deadhead it, so densely that you might have sown a lawn come the following spring. Seedlings that burrow fast into the crowns of anything that isn’t fast enough to eclipse their early growth, then forming a network of bulbs that are impossible to disentangle.