Early spring morning, crouched in the cold, wearing pyjamas and wellies, putting together an Easter garden with my son. My legs begin to ache as we line the oven cleaning tub with soil and horticultural grit. I try kneeling, but the frost has made the patio into a sheet of burning cold and so I resort to a garden kneeler which hasn’t seen the light of day for four months. My son places small slabs of local limestone together to represent Christ’s tomb, and they immediately collapse.
This morning is an okay early spring day; it’s warmish in the sun, we are filled with the feel-good of a week of family playdates and I think the three of us and the cat feel like we are shaking off winter.
This year everything has been about home. Getting through a winter lockdown is of course an extra challenge, but of all the seasons it’s in every winter that I find any sense of the spiritual beyond the high, bright sacred rites of December can tend to evade me. Life can feel a little vacuous and flat as we hole ourselves up with Netflix, and with evidence of the Truth represented by unopened Christmas presents. Dark Ages Christian monks, it is said, organised their embodied communion with God around the opportunities for connection and experience in either the ‘Cave’, at the ‘Table’ and on the ‘Road’. Whilst I have had time to consume podcasts and books with a passion this winter, my personal cave is now a little crowded and I long for the table and fellowship with others, but more than that, the ‘Road’. My relationship with God began and always longs for nature, and my instinct for Pilgrimage is calling me away from lockdown!
We plant little narcissi, lay some moss over the stones and erect a tiny cross made of garden canes into the Sacred Oven Cleaning tray. The way we say a school prayer and sit back to enjoy the birdsong.
In our household, we usually plan a few adventures to get into nature in Winter. We have variously done a quest to the summit of a Welsh mountain on New Years’ Day; the dare of a January river paddle and a sledging trip when winter seems to have delivered all we will ever need in the virgin snow on the garden path. But the unending stuffiness and closeted comfort of food delivery, central heating and on-tap distraction on screens is ultimately something my soul, like many longs to get away from. It’s not only the new shoots and new growth that Spring brings which we long for, but a chance to fling open the windows, lie on grass, not draw the curtains, and to return to vivid, nourishing reality. Identifying as I do with the Celtic church, the Bible is the First Book, and Nature is the second, therefore Spring is a sacred Feast of its own.
Some of my favourite writing about Spring comes from the abundance of nature writing from the Northern Hemisphere that has been published in the last decade and some from lusciously atmospheric fiction.
I think many of us feel a great empathy for what we read in perceptive nature writing. I recently read ‘Wild Hares and Hummingbirds’ by Stephen Moss, which was written a few years ago. He describes the kind of gathering crescendo as life returns to the village of Mark on the Somerset Levels in Somerset. The land is soggy, low and deep feeling; literally in a bowl surrounded by the M5 and islands of clay and Jurassic sandstone – most notably, Glastonbury Tor, Brent Knoll hill and the Island of Wedmore. I used to ‘commute’ to an outdoor job through Mark – a desperately needed and wanted job which I commuted along the way down the motorway to attend. Dropping down from the motorway slip road and into the village, past the rhines (roadside drainage channels), cider orchards and ancient winding pumps always made me feel like I had entered a certain special place in time and space. It always made me want to write.
Stephen Moss describes the village waking up from winter; “A hesitant dusk chorus fills the heart of the village with sound, punctuating the twilight silence of the past few months.” I am there with him as he describes the deep joy at finding his first unfurling snowdrop.
My favourite works of fiction are also those which describe so vividly the natural world around the characters, which somehow enables me to feel the emotions of the piece more deeply.
For me, no writing does this more so than Thomas Hardy’s descriptions of his Wessex – focussed on the modern-day counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, south Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Somerset. Having briefly worked at an historic site in Dorset I can say that there is nowhere quite like the white chalk hills of Cranborne Chase in Spring. Already the light there seems to reflect the chalk which peeks out as perfectly round hills give way to escarpments and when the snowdrops and wild daffodils come there is an imagined impression of hope and uplifting, spiralling light. Pegged down amongst the hills are ancient sites – burial mounds and earthworks. Hardy uses the region’s ancient past to underpin a sense that his characters are of the earth and of a nature which is wild and proudly human.
In my all time favourite, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy describes spring with detached observation, as if welcoming a community of ‘players’ and biological inevitable growth as Tess, the hero, builds to her first real love affair. Instincts to mate and procreate run alongside the inevitable unfurling of spring, it would seem:
“The season developed and matured. Another instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches and such ephemeral creatures took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when they were nothing more than inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifting up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked up scents in invisible jets and breathings.”
The nature writing of Rob Cowen has really drawn me in these past years. Rob spends his time consciously studying the life of the ‘Edgelands’ – the points at the edges of Harrogate, North Yorkshire where abandoned railway sidings and industrial structures are overgrown with unmanaged, wild nature. To me Rob captures the luminescence of the early spring by describing how the mystery of the old metal shapes, the pylons and the workers paths, frame the promise of the unfurling spring, lending a sense of the imminent to our imagination about what will pop up and out of the ground next and where this flat cold path will lead us in the lingering light of dusk.
It was said of Gilbert White; a country naturalist of the mid-18th C, as yet untouched by Romanticism and predating Darwin; “in spite of his modesty and extreme reticence, his spirit shines in every page; that the world will not willingly let this small book die….chiefly because it is a very delightful human document.”(Zoologist, Alfred Newton, cited: Anne Secord, Oxford World’s Classics edition) Newton is referring to his ‘A Natural History of Selborne’…an anthology of his letters describing in a mildly humorous and largely detached observational way, the flora and fauna of his East Hampshire estate. Newton recognises that Gilbert White’s observations capture a kind of ‘first contact’ with society and the diversity of nature. It is the human reaction to the species he studies which makes the writing so enduring. Of the curlews, Gilbert writes:
“Oedicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swoln like those of a gouty man.”
Likewise, in ‘Common Ground’, it is Rob Cowen’s very human response that we enjoy as he describes the things of beauty and mystery at his ‘Edgelands’ in spring:
“While my back was turned, the blackthorn blossomed. Its flowers are heaped over at the meadow’s edges like snow, bright enough to burn your retinas. They are Tate & Lyle white, the white of wedding dresses and meringues, bleached against the contrast of their black, leafless branches. A crow is suspended for a second in the sky above, held as if on wires. From that height sloe flowers in rows must resemble chalk on a football pitch, parcelling up fields, splicing the meadows, woods, road verges and houses.”
By the end of Rob’s narrative, we are beyond angry alongside him that rights to work the land were robbed of people centuries ago with the Inclosures Acts and Highland Clearances, and that now we are reduced to voyeuristically exploring the edges of things.
A life immersed in place, is how I would describe the writings of Katharine Swift, in her autobiographical ‘The Morville Hours’ and ‘The Morville Year’. Morville being a hamlet in the utterly beautiful, often wild and lesser visited county of Shropshire. Morville is close to the Wenlock Edge, the ‘blue’ Shropshire Hills of A.E. Housman’s poem and itself steeped in history which Katharine immerses herself in as she works to establish a garden to reflect its tapestry of lives across the centuries. On seeing her first bluebells of the season Katharine writes:
“it is a sight to take your breath away – literally, as when you wade out into cold sea water, and one wave, bigger than the others, suddenly catches you unaware smack in the midriff. It’s the unexpectedness of them, glimpsed through distant trees. But there is something of cool blue water about the colour and movement of bluebells: the way they flow in little eddies and swirls, lapping at the trunks of trees; the way they collect in the hollows and overflow down the hillside, at first in little rivulets and then in whole cascades.”
One of the most ‘human’, endearing and gentle stories I ever read was by another woman, moving to establish a fulfilling life in a ‘wilder’ landscape. ‘A Ram in the Well’ by June Know-Mawer is described as ‘A Welsh Homecoming’. I have never developed more affection for a country in a book than through this one. The characters are friendly, and the sense of the local community is strong. Of Spring on her Welsh mountain, where she buys an old farm building and a ram, June describes a morning in her valley:
“The valley is a dream of beauty, veiled in a pale golden light, the air being soft with new scents – hawthorn, bluebells, primroses…. In the half-light the house is enfolded in the peculiar dense silence of the mountain. I like to think my mountain is a presiding spirit and consider myself lucky to live in its shadow.” June Knox-Mwar
When I was in my twenties, long before I had a son to build Easter gardens with, I was working at an Iron Age village, and literally telling school children stories around the hearth. I began to read literature from Celtic and folkloric scholars. Probably the single most important passage I have read, digested and meditated on in relation to spring is Caitlin Matthews ‘Song of Imbolc’, about February 1st to May 1st every year:
“I am the unopened bud and the blossom,
I am the life-force gathering to a crest,
I am the still companion of the silence,
I am the far flung seeker of the quest,
I am the daughter gathering in wisdom,
I am the son whose questions never cease,
I am the dawn-light seeking out glad justice,
I am the centre where all souls find peace.”
This, to me, embodies all of the potential of the season, and what it has meant to generations of people, and especially to the populations of tribes or Kingdoms in Celtic and Saxon Britain. The words very cleverly are not wholly Pagan or Christian, but suit my instinct, and my lived experience of finding the Christ consciousness in Nature. Or that is how I see it.
My imagination is easily captured with thoughts of life over the Atlantic in states which share our climate. I recently completely gobbled up Sebastian Barry’s ‘Days Without End’. It is a love story between two soldiers who begin life as penniless Irish immigrants, striking deals with native communities and the rough justice of the early settled towns. Epic journeys across glorious landscapes are celebrated as an antidote to their dangerous lives. Often, the monologue that is the unending first-person narrative, pauses to use such beautiful, sometimes raw and sometimes shocking descriptions of the states through which they travel, that I literally have to put the book down and take it in. On spring, Sebastian Barry’s ‘Thomas McNulty’ describes a time of peace when the lovers got to stop and sow, lending a hand at a Tennessee farm:
“Snow goes and then we are ploughing like our lives depend on it which they do. Now the four mules are hitched and show their worth and plough forty acres back and forth three times. The land is lined for plants and then the little plants are brought into the fields and one spikes the earth with a peg and another plants a plant and another gives it water and feed. And Tennyson sings his African songs and we’re stooped in the trees for midday dinner. Lige oftentimes plays the fiddle so as the notes go into the woods to twitch the sleep of birds.”
An essential part of our home life, as the year turns, is to pick up the season’s Brambly Hedge book by Jill Barklem (that I purposely leave on the dresser) and enjoy its intricate pictures of mice living in tree stumps. My son and I followed the route of their staircases through the myriad rooms Jill Barklem illustrated – apparently while she sat on a train commuting in London. Now I know more of the countryside than I did when I was seven, I also appreciate the attention to detail depicting the British spring, in her ‘Spring Story’ book – a tale of a birthday picnic amongst the primroses and crabapple blossom. We sit side by side to investigate what the mice are cooking in their cavernous kitchens and wonder how long it takes them to eat a whole chestnut. We put our central heating on, as the April wind reminds us that winter is not long gone and sit to dream of the kind of sunny days that Mr Apple the mouse and friends appears to be having at Brambly Hedge – the most charming of children’s books that truly do so much to introduce us to nature. “For this good food from our green fields may we be very grateful,” says Mr Apple, “If you get [the knives] out, we can cut the pies!”