If you subscribe to the meteorological definition of the seasons, spring arrived on 1 March. But I’m a firm fan of the astronomical year and wait for the vernal equinox on 20 March, when day and night are of equal length, to revel in the blossom.
In early January I cheered myself up with the thought that by the end of the month it would still be light at 5pm. And the first day on which it felt like winter might be easing came a few weeks ago – one of those glorious sunny February days when the air felt thick with the syrupy smell of sarcococca (sweet box) and the earliest daffodils began to pop.
There have been crocuses in the parks for a month or so, and I’ve been spotting camellias, especially the big bright Barbara Cartland ones, like I’m on a treasure hunt. The electric blanket has been on less regularly.
At times like this, the traditional terms for the seasons don’t really feel up to scratch. You can see why there’s been a growing appreciation for the Japanese tradition of microseasons, which don’t cling to specific dates but encourage us to mark the passage of time by looking more closely.
They are named after small events: February saw “East wind melts the ice”, “Rain moistens the soil” and “Mist starts to linger”. We are now between “Grass sprouts, trees bud” and “Hibernating insects surface”.
This is useful in these final wintry days – especially when cold snaps return. For years, garden writer Andrew Timothy O’Brien has been encouraging people to document “winterspring” on Instagram, whether it’s the swelling of birdsong or the long blushing sunsets. In his book To Stand and Stare: How to Garden While Doing Next to Nothing, he describes this season: “Impatient neither to shuffle off the previous year nor run headlong into the next, a space opens out around me and there seems time to appreciate the here and now.”
It’s easier to savour the space between winter and spring on the rare sunny days than on blustery ones: all that March offers in glimpses of spring it takes away with yet another storm to threaten the cold frame.
Still, after weeks of grumpily staring out of the kitchen window, I find myself lured outside. It’s a time for cleaning and sharpening secateurs, cutting back old growth (hibernating insects, after all, are surfacing) and saying a warm hello to the bulbs that survived the winter – and the hungry squirrels.
The last weekends of winter are about small jobs, a warm-up for the gardening grunt to come. Cut grasses down into neat little mounds, enjoy the gentle surprise of seeing the red hands of peonies return, watch for brave buds on the clematis, and rake and sprinkle seed into lawns. Soon enough it’ll all be happening too quickly to take in.
