We’re there. Winter’s over: we passed the vernal equinox – 3.40am, Friday 20 March – when daylight wins over darkness. When spring and seeds and hopes for the year are safely unleashed. When most gardeners start trickling back.
Today is also Mothering Sunday. For many it’s a day to look back as well as forward. For me, it means primroses. One of the few days when Lilian would go to church, with many other mums, to be given flowers picked by the village school kids. My reluctant brother and me draped in cassocks and surplices in the choir. Devon hedgerows in the 60s were awash with primrose, so everyone picked them for Mother’s Day, encouraged by their teachers. A lot less likely now, I think.
We were at the Danish plot at the end of February for my mother-in-law’s big birthday. The hare raced us on the road. We disturbed a young deer who tried to hide behind our woodshed. Spring arrives a few weeks later there. Runs of single snowdrops line the grass or gather by the hedge. But it is the pale wild primrose I look for, grouped by the trees. They will soon be joined by violets, cowslips, shy hepatica whose liver-shaped leaves are showing.
The deer has been cropping the naturalised tulips. I try not to mind too much. Against the packet’s instructions I sow nasturtiums in the repurposed molehills. I figure Denmark has had its warmest and wettest-ever winter, seed-sowing advice may need to change. There are swans and kittiwakes in new lakes in the farmer’s fields. Here, too, there have been continuous storms.
We sleep to the sound of a roaring sea. We will return (I hope) at Easter with urgent work to do. The primrose may be gone by then, but not the memories of my first garden, and my foster mum.
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