The sting of young nettles is never more so than now, when ignited by the first stirrings at the end of winter. The familiar ringing that lingers on my hands into the evenings is something I know well from splitting the snowdrops. I do this as soon as their flowers dim and there is a window before the nettles get away in earnest and suddenly there are demands back up in the garden. This close and detailed work is something I savour for the opportunity to witness the first signs of life on my knees and with time to take in the environment down by the stream. The smell of the wild garlic as you bruise its first leaves and the close-up observation of sprung celandines, pressed flat against the earth, with their distinctive shiny leaves like miniature waterlilies. The first green hellebores, green upon green, with ivy and moss and dog’s mercury. And, as we come up the ditch and out into the light, precocious primroses and the gold of early marsh marigolds offering up flower to early bumblebees where the sun hits the warmest flanks.
With the repetitiveness of a simple task, you begin to see that winter is waning, one cycle overlapping the next in a quickening surge towards spring. Primroses appearing as the snowdrops lose their lustre and the first wild daffodils taking the snowdrop’s place as if the timing had been planned for. I make a note to myself to remember to plant more Narcissus pseudonarcissus. The small group by a fallen oak that I planted in-the-green a decade ago have seeded and the seedlings are just beginning to flower. The heavy seed from the parent plants dropped at the reach of the seedpod and a little more where the seed tumbled downhill. Five or six years to flower and then another drop from the second generation and seedlings to follow on in a slow but sure expansion of their territory.
April, this most delicate of months. Soft with new growth, poplars silvering and wild cherry lighting the valley. We can be sure now in the knowledge that we finally have momentum. An unstoppable push with the flash of yellow dandelion, cowslip and cuckoo flower. Ahead of the grass in the meadows for these few days they have their moment, but not for long now that the rush is with us.
This second week of the month, the one just past, is a reliable moment to take in this brief and wonderful window. A time when the newness is as fresh as it ever will be, untarnished by the elements and at its most vital. As green, as shiny or downy and often saturated with an inky stain and bronzing. A colouring that is ephemeral, particular to now and to be savoured for the hand full of days it is at its best. This year we took a fortnight to be in the garden and to be part of it, to look and to do.
This week we welcomed our friends from Hokkaido, who have travelled all the way from their snowbound island to steal a march on spring and reconnect with their British gardening fraternity.
Spring is suddenly with us and with it a few days without rain have allowed the primroses to finally lift their heads. Since finishing the cutback in the last week of February, the stirring which we could then feel but barely see has sprung. New life, where just a fortnight ago we were looking at bare earth and imagining what is now vital and clear. The patterns and groupings in plan view, yet to be three dimensional, as you see them when working out a planting plan and having to imagine the volumes and interconnectedness.
In this brief window – which in my opinion is the perfect three weeks of the planting season here – I go back into the garden to assess where I need to make changes. Are the sanguisorba in need of splitting? They will resent it if you try to do this in the autumn. Can I get away with one more season without dividing the Iris sibirica? They also prefer division in the spring, but this needs to be done right now – preferably last week – before the shoots rush away further and are easily damaged. A monkish bald patch in the centre of the plant lets you know that it is time to replenish the vigour at the heart as it grows away in each direction. With the garden maturing this task alone is a good day’s work, so we pace ourselves, taking one or two groups a year and leaving some to provide a show whilst the new divisions catch up and can cover in relay for splits in future seasons. I note the plants that demand little or no attention. The amsonia, peonies and hemerocallis that rarely need division. These are the members of the community that allow you to give attention to those that need it most.
I have been called away for a week of work in the States. One longstanding project on the west coast where we are already in summer and a new landscape on the east coast where I will be stepping back into earlier spring. Work is not a word that suits an exciting few days of making things happen, but even so, it is a small torture to leave in this week that sits so very definitely between spring and summer. A time marked in our landscape by lanes narrowed with cow parsley and creamy clouds of hawthorn stepping through the woods and marching down the hedgerows.
In Japan the year is divided into 72 seasons each lasting about five days and the principle applies here too, if you make the time to look and take in the many shifts and changes. Five days for the buds to suddenly be in evidence on the Malus hupehensis, five days for the buds to break and the tree to cover itself in five more days of the purest white blossom. In that time the blue Iris hollandica planted alongside them have been joined by a sea of yellow catsear. Standing under the trees this morning I drank in the spectacle and noted the first petals falling. It will be five more days, the time I am away, for the blossom to drop and dim into the burgeoning green of summer.
This, the last week of March, I have been away for work. The work is exciting, but leaving at this moment of awakening is always hard. To miss what you have been waiting all winter for. First green in the hawthorn hedges, the wild narcissus at their peak, epimediums unfurling and the deepest crimson of peony foliage.
There was one bud open on the Yoshino cherry (main image) when I left, but the tree had been gradually transforming over the weekend. Not fast enough to visibly see the flush of sugary pink intensifying, but enough to feel it gathering in the toing and froing as we walked under its branches in the yard. Winter to spring and a moment I find most wonderful in the early stages of blossom gathering pace. I will not miss the spectacle of the tree in full flower, but in the five days away I will miss the moment. The alchemy of energy moving after the last dark months of slumber.
The hungry gap has been shorter than usual this year, but we are still in the slim pickings phase of the new round of harvesting. The spring cabbages are over. The remainder of last season’s kales have all gone to flower, as have the beetroot, their gargantuan roots now tough and woody. We have eaten our fill and fill of chard. And so we have been watching very closely to see when the first of the real spring vegetables will appear.
From the Instagram feeds of restaurants and foodies you would think that late spring began in late February, since that was when the posts of asparagus, broad beans, peas, artichokes and even courgettes started appearing. At that time of year I just know that most of those vegetables will have come from the polytunnels of Spain, perhaps southern Italy or even further afield, and I always feel rather duped by the promise of early summer they make when in reality it is only now that those vegetables are starting to make an appearance in British gardens and farmer’s markets.
There is an exponential moment that happens at the beginning of May. A coming together of energy that is altogether bigger than anything we can garden. A bluebell wood hovering and luminous or the brilliant carpet of wild garlic that make the woods their own. It is a particular feeling to be part of this energy if you put the time aside to do so. To pause and feel the surge.
To achieve the same experience in a garden is something to strive for. A feeling of immersion where the sum of the parts is greater than the components. A generosity that stops you in your rush or diversions, because the very nature of the moment is that it will be fleeting, and probably just the once. The light falling a certain way, the particularities of the year or just chancing to be there when it all comes together.
It is two weeks since I last wrote and I have spent the majority of the intervening fortnight in bed with Covid. Hit harder than I had anticipated, the Easter weekend completely passed me by, my duvet clamped firmly over my head. When I finally surfaced on Thursday and ventured out into the garden the change was astounding. Growth everywhere and flowers bringing colour to the green in every direction. I didn’t have the energy to write a full piece this week and so yesterday I picked up my camera to record what immediately struck me in the newly sprung garden. This is an edited record of my first impressions as I stepped out of the house for the first time. At first I was transfixed by the pots just outside the back door, but finally I ventured further afield, blinking into the late afternoon sunshine to explore as much of the garden as I could easily reach.
The tide has turned and each day the wash of green becomes more intense. Down by the stream, in the woods the ground has already disappeared beneath a flood of wild garlic, nettle, dogs mercury, archangel, cow parsley and wood anemone. You feel the total newness of everything and understand that nothing will ever be this new again. Standing amidst this glowing green as the morning sun lights everything with an intense luminosity you feel simultaneously a sense of grounded calm alongside a persistent, restless energy. Seemingly connected to a primal woodland dwelling memory, the vitality of green makes you feel grounded, alert and alive.
Soon the canopy will close over, filtering green light to make an underwater world of the understorey. But right now the buds are only just breaking. Young leaves have avoided the recent frosts and unfurl to reveal themselves in all their soft vulnerability. Hazel, hornbeam, hawthorn, willow, elder and alder are all awakening, while the oak and the ash are still deciding whether we shall have a wet or dry summer. Ivy has a polished sheen of newness and wherever you look every shade of green is layered one on the other – leaf green, apple green, grass green, sap green, olive green, acid green, sage green, lime green, jade green, emerald green, blue green, chartreuse and citrine.
