Spring

This is the time when the chilly rain and gray landscape of the Irish winter gives way to the cool beauty of summer, when the fields erupt in oxlips and daffodils, the hedgerows swell with delicious hawthorn shoots, and the riverbanks ripple with nutritious nettles. In these months the usually solitary herons flying in pairs over the canals, and while jogging along the banks I spot the occasional bullfinch and kingfisher. Yesterday I spotted something extraordinary -- a goshawk flew out of our hedgerow and into our woodlot, followed by an explosion of panicked swallows and other birds flying in all directions. 

This year, though, everything is late; after six months of Irish winter and a month of Scandanavian winter, the hawthorn shoots are only now timidly peeking out of the tips of branches, and the usually brilliant blackthorn trees have not yet even hinted at blooming. Bluebells would ordinarily be spreading across the forest floor, flooding the woods with a brilliant violet light. 

Ordinarily our linden tree would be sagging with bushels of tender leaves that make an excellent salad, but this year we will have to wait until May. Only now are the primroses peeking out of the slowly drying mud, and the fields slowly turning green with new shoots -- the newborn lambs wobbling across the fields are scrounging for good meals this year. 

I visited my neighbour Seamus today -- I feel the need to check on him, although he's spent a lifetime working the Irish countryside here, and at 86 he seems healthier than most 30-year-olds I know. Ordinarily he's over the moon this time of year, t's his time to plough and plant the fields, to pat the chitted potato shoots into his patch of dry soil in the Bog of Allen. 

"We've lost a month," he said. "The fields are still too wet from the winter snows to plant, and no one can take tractors into them -- they would get bogged down, or rip up the fields until you couldn't plant. We've never had a winter like this, and now I don't know if we'll have a hot summer, or a late one, or no summer at all -- you can't tell anymore." 

When the blackthorns do bloom, I will set out with The Girl to mark them again, either with ribbons around the trunks or simply by counting steps and remembering where they are. Their small plain leaves are not obtrusive most of the year, and their small black fruits hide easily in shadow, so we must mark them now to gather sloes in November. At the same time we'll gather comfrey from the canal banks, an excellent addition to our compost. 

Thankfully, we have seeds already saved for this year, we have raised beds and a greenhouse, and we have seedlings planted inside and ready to go. This year I'll be quite busy with work and studying, and trying to write more, and The Girl is now a teenager working on her own projects, so it was to be a light year for the garden anyway -- good timing for us. 

We cut our grass for the first time this past weekend, and will probably do so about once every month or two for the next six months. Many people cut their grass far too often, keeping it from developing healthy plants. When I could, I replaced grass with edible and attractive plants like cowslip, primrose, Good King Henry, fat hen and chamomile.

I'm hoping that the warm weather will give me the chance to see more people, in the same way that the snow did. The unseasonable weather, like any emergency, brought people together, reminded us how we’ve lost touch with each other – and gave us a chance to turn that trend around.

Top photo: The forest floor around now. Bottom photo: See those bluebells? We don't.