Now I Know it's Spring
The simple joys that are actually sheer magic
The sun warms my skin as I sit, parasol partly shading me, sipping lemon and mint tea. The season turned as I plucked that first mint leaf from its terracotta, garden pot. Hidden away during the winter, gathering strength, the plant lay dormant under the soil, waiting. Sun and showers prompted it’s growth and now it is lush and green, waiting. Waiting for me to enjoy as tea or soon with freshly pulled new potatoes is my human view of this plant. But the mint wants to flower, be pollinated and reproduce and in this wanting is reliant on me to carefully manage how much I take.
Everything is responding to this change in season. The birdsong is strong. Plucky wrens belt out their tune, competing with robin, goldfinch and chiff chaff. We’re here and ready to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed once again.
Little dots of yellow have appeared across the lawn, lesser celandine. Self-set and self-spreading. A welcome pop of colour for the eyes and pollen for the bees. Cuckoo flowers push up through the grass, standing tall and proud. I watch with sheer joy as an orange tip butterfly flits from flower to flower.
A few days pass and once the morning mist has lifted, I take my steaming mug of tea outside and sit next to the abundant blossoms of our apple tree. Each flower so beautiful in its own right but together a sight that takes my breath away. The bees buzz and I dream of apples yet to come and the sheer magic of this transformation.
This garden is teeming with life. This is because it is not my design, I’ve co-created it with nature. Plants are not generally bought but instead they just appear, brought by the wind, birds or as seeds hooked to my jumper. It’s not just my garden, it’s our garden. The wild ones and I co-exist in as much harmony and symbiosis as possible.
Perfect, it’s not. Messy might be the general view. But in a world where gardens are often rooms: an extension of the home, mowed and weeded and designed wholly or mostly for the human inhabitants, where lawnmowers chomp the daisies, the spines are strimmed from sleeping hedgehogs, front gardens are parking places and unwanted wild plants are referred to as weeds and pulled and poisoned out of existence; my garden (or should I say our garden? For I share it with many) is a slice of a truly wild spring in amongst the manicured suburban landscape. For some people, spring might be a bluebell wood or magnolia blossom in the garden of a stately home; as much as I appreciate those things my slice of suburbia is where spring comes alive in all it’s wildness.
Thank you for reading.
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