March arrives, and suddenly the moment of shift I’ve been waiting for all winter is here: the vernal equinox. The almost imperceptible shift that happens when the night and day balance so perfectly, and then we topple headlong into bright, sharp, delighting mornings, and long, languorous, just-one-more-drink evenings in the orchard. The lightness stretches and the dark contracts, and there is growth and fresh wild garlic, and the sound of lawnmowers choking into life after the season of being left idle in the shed. I don’t feel the weight of winter when it is present, but I feel the lightness of its lifting. Then, just when the air starts to warm and the blossom starts to blossom, there is the smell.

I don’t know what the smell is. Maybe my ancestors did, maybe the scientists do. There is a theory that the human nose evolved to detect the chemical compounds that characterise healthy soil in the same way a shark’s nose evolved to detect a drop of blood in an ocean. It is not petrichor before you tell me it is. It isn’t even geosmin. It isn’t a scent that I detect with my nose, but with my whole body. It is the return of life itself.

I feel it first on my skin and then in my bones. I fizz like shaken champagne, and I am reminded of my very favourite PG Wodehouse quote:

"What a morning! Warm, fragrant, balmy, yet with just that nip in the air that puts a fellow on his toes. The yeast of spring is fermenting in my veins, and I am ready for anything."
Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)

It’s not just me though. Life and potential are everywhere I look. The leaves of the trees, the tips of the weeds pushing through the soil, the red of the returning peony buds, the seeds in the trays on my windowsill. Now is the time to start flinging seed around with abandon. If your ground is warm enough, the light has caught up so try a bit of direct sowing with some old seed or those spare packets that are going to languish for another year if you don’t use them up.

There is magic around the vernal equinox which means risks can pay off in unexpected ways. Old magic. Ask the cosmos for your wishes to come true.

I know what I’m wishing for and there’s champagne on ice. The equinox is the time for change.

Flowers in March

The start of March is a different beast to the end. Some Marches are full of popping tulips, and some full of snow. I do believe that this one has turned a corner though; there is a warmth that means we have stepped into spring and there is absolutely no going back now.

I have one single variety of tulip in flower though, and so I am not yet so certain in declaring it tulip season. And I am (unusually) ok with that. For now is the time of the daffodil. I kept myself going with some indoor narcissi but they were flung aside when the real deal arrived.

My village is famous for its daffodil drifts and no, I still don’t like the common yellows (few of my instagram posts have been quite so contentious), the paler form of Narcissus pseudonarcissus is adored, as much for its name as anything else. I don’t think that is what is slowly creeping across the orchard. The bulbs planted around the fruit trees were meant to be a mix of heady doubles in tones of gold and cream. They aren’t. But I have done my best with them, so here they are.

Other flowers in bloom right now:

Japanese quince - ‘Texas Scarlet’
Exquisite tiny epimedium flowers from some plants bought at NGS open gardens in the Isle of Wight last August, photographed with unidentified heuchara leaves, ditto.