Country diary: A truly golden spring for buttercups and dandelions | Wild flowers

This spring has specialised in very specific kinds of abundance. In February it was snowdrops in extraordinary numbers, but last month it was dandelions. My most exulted sighting came as I drove out of upper Dovedale when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a blanket of gold running over the slope.

The flowers held the foreground before the eye travelled onwards to Sheen Hill in Staffordshire. We overuse the word “carpet”, but in this instance it was appropriate. Each bloom was about the same height as all its neighbours, and if you eliminated gaps in colour by getting down face to face with the flower heads, then the whole land was turned into a single glorious sunshine hue.

There is an irony here. While dandelions seem a democratic and self-levelling community, they are not one kind. There are about 240 species in Britain. I’m in awe of my friend Baz Scampion, who recently co-published a book on The Dandelions of Shetland, which he acknowledges is “a little niche”. Yet hats off to him and his co-author for finding 130 species on one archipelago.

I monitored who’d enjoyed April’s dandelions as much as me, and the mowing teams of our borough and many parish councils were not in that number. Love came mainly from bumblebees and various solitary bees in the genus Andrena. They in turn gave me another key moment. I was again in Dovedale at dawn, where, to the tune of redstart and willow warbler songs, there were entire dew-soaked fields glittering with the air‑filled silver of dandelion clocks.

This month added a third encounter. I was above the hamlet of Snitterton and there was a different glimpse of gold. I paced out across the fields, because as far as you could see to the hill crown and beyond were flowering buttercups in hundreds of thousands. The three common species don’t observe any concern for equal height and thus their showing is more a vast gold-stippled canvas – more Seurat, perhaps, than the dandelion’s Rothko-like sweep of colour – but it was so beautiful I wanted to raise my hands aloft and swirl around.