Spring

The daffodils are out, and so, therefore, are the optimistic diners. A couple of rickety tables and wonky chairs are dragged out from their storage and plonked on a bit of uneven concrete on what passes as pavement in London. They are a strange breed, this first flush of outdoor diners who think a tiny ray of weak sunlight breaking through the two-degree cold heralds the start of summer. I’m not talking about the people braving the elements under a leaky conservatory roof, crowded around outdoor heaters and wrapped in blankets, who are best known as smokers or vapers. No, I mean the hardy, ‘freezing fresh air is better than indoor air’ lot we are about to see shivering through their fake smiles as they push aside a bowl of freezing cold soup that can’t quite pass as gazpacho.

By the calendar it is winter, but the days are longer and the birds are singing. Snowdrops are scattered around the front door, and crocuses have already broken through on my lawn. Mostly they are slim and pale, but when the sun has shone they have opened their purple cups to its warmth. Virginia Woolf compared the yellow anther within to a lit match.  In defiance of the calendar, spring shows its face. Hellebores droop with dappled flowers. Kneeling in damp earth to trim back their old leaves reveals their profusion. Catkins are on the trees, magnolia buds are splitting with promise, the scent of the daphne cuts the cold air, and the blade-like leaves of spring bulbs, ‘the green fuse that drives the flower’, push up along the grass bank beside the road.

“C’est ma faute,” I called up to the local old boys as they strolled past my potager, chuckling among themselves. I tried to match their levity, but it was obviously affected; they could sense my panic. It was late-April and my garden resembled an eccentrically out-of-season Halloween scene, with tomato plants standing eerily motionless like infant ghosts, wrapped from head to toe in protective fleece. Everyone knows that 41°F is too cold for tomatoes, but spring had been deceptively warm, and I couldn’t help myself. AccuWeather had issued a grim prediction for the night’s minimum temperature. Only a few days previously, I had been openly proud that my plants had been in the ground for two weeks. I felt foolish and impetuous.

Spring, as Chaucer pointed out, occasionally has the curious effect of making people “long on pilgrimage to go / And palmers to be seeking foreign strands / To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.” The May morning may come when you find it in your heart to pick up the pilgrim’s staff and wend your way along the paths of olden Spain to Santiago de Compostela. There are several ancient ways to reach the distant shrine of St. James, and if you are a lover of the road less traveled, you may find yourself drawn to the Camino del Norte, which begins in the western Pyrenees of the Basque country, then hugs the long beaches and jagged cliffs of the Atlantic shoreline through Cantabria and Asturias before curving inland through Galicia to the Apostle’s tomb.

Everyone has their own most loved and hated months. While for Chaucer, Browning and others April was a time of joyful rebirth, it was of course for Eliot ‘the cruellest month’. Still, February tends to get a bad rap from everybody. It manages to be both the shortest and longest month of the year. In theory the days are getting longer, and yet the darkness of the previous night and the next morning blur, making for a grim nocturnal existence. It doesn’t matter if you’re a night owl or a morning lark, in February you’re commuting from work in the dark. Still, better than midwinter isn’t it? Hardly. The glamorous, festive part of the season is a mulled wine-blurred distant memory.

There is no finer sight in spring than a blossom tree. Planting one is, to my mind, a public service, as it will cheer generations of people plodding down your street, both with the blooms that appear on its branches, and with the confetti of petals thrown along the pavement. In the next few weeks, the streets are going to become incredibly well-dressed with blossom, and here are five to look out for in particular:  Mimosa, Acacia dealbata  This is already out in London, and my goodness, you can't miss it. It is the most vivid lemon yellow collection of little pompoms you can imagine, bursting out of beautiful ferny foliage.