Spring, a love story

In the week, I live by my diary. At the weekend, I live by the weather.

Saturday is usually my writing day. If I’m lucky, my photography day too, but it’s meant to be the day I sit down and craft some words. As we come to the end of February, this has been very much a weekend of two halves.

It is Sunday, I am looking out of the window at gusts and gales. A tub of crab apple branches, waiting for me to get round to clipping, has just been thrown across the kitchen garden, and I am just wondering about checking the greenhouse for the fourth time.

Yesterday was a whole different story. I threw off coats and jumpers and I basked. I dug the roses into their new beds and restored some hedge germander into knot garden rows. I put a rather cramped looking yellow magnolia into a huge terracotta pot (I had a pot free because my husband finally won the war of the wisteria, and it has been rehomed to another cottage in the village; he hates them) and added some bulbs to the base. I cut lengths of metal to replace the bamboo frame around my espaliered pear, now it has finally been dug into its final growing space.

I got properly hot. I sat on the bench, nestled into the beech hedge and wondered where my sunglasses were.

An aside, I am sure you all know about SPF and being outside but both of my parents have been diagnosed with macular degeneration, and I asked my optician what I could do to prevent it. Two things she said: dark leafy greens, and wear sunglasses outdoors. This was the equivalent of telling a toddler that the only thing that will keep them healthy is ice cream for breakfast. I am only really happy when wearing huge sunglasses and I eat kale like it’s going out of fashion. I had to build the new kitchen garden just to supply us with the amount of swiss chard we get through.

I found my sunglasses yesterday and I felt the warmth reigniting me to the depth of my bones. It’s a fizz that starts with individual bubbles and pops, a warm tingle in the fingers and toes. I know by mid-March I will be as deliriously active as a just popped Bollinger. Right now though, it is the hints and the anticipation that is keeping me on the edge. Arit Anderson wrote an incredible piece for Scribehound this week where she gave this a name.

Vernalagnia.

'Vernal' would have to refer to spring from the Latin word vernus, but the 'lagnia' is a little more obscure. Derived from lagneia, a Greek word meaning 'lust', according to various sources. Vernalagnia 'it means a romantic mood brought on by spring' or 'spring fever'.

I prefer, ‘spring lust’.

So here I sit. Surrounded by seeds and envelopes (the seed sale was incredible, and I am getting through all of your orders, I promise), gazing through the wet window to a shivering and shaking bay tree, and lusting after spring.