Tuning in to the music of spring...

Now is the time to witness the stirring of new life

ACCORDING to the ancient Irish calendar, spring started on February 1, St Brigid’s Day. Considering that our climate has been getting warmer, this must surely rank as one of the great monuments to our sense of optimism.

The start of February always seems to me to be stuck in the rut of mid-winter when the sun rises late and goes to bed early. Most of us, I suspect, are glad to see the back of January but, for a week or two, nothing seems to change; and then suddenly we notice that it’s still light, if not exactly bright, outside as the Six One News starts.

This for me is the first sign of spring. More of a harbinger, perhaps, as I realise that if I set out for an hour’s walk in the woods at 5pm, I won’t fall into a ditch as I complete my trek. This small advance means a lot to me, not least in practical terms so that I don’t have to take time out of the working day to get my daily dose of exercise, but because something is stirring. Barely perceptibly our planet is doing something mysterious and wonderful.

The year is starting to turn. I don’t much care that spring, in our hemisphere of the globe, officially starts on March 20 and ends, amazingly, on June 21, according to astronomical calculations (it has to do with our angle to the sun, I gather); or that the weather forecasters think in terms of March 1 to May 31, which I find more plausible. The first stirring, the first sign, is that sudden realisation of more daylight.

My personal catalogue of spring signs reflect the way I live and, I suppose, the way I grew up in Dublin but now spend most of my time on a remote hillside where Cork merges imperceptibly with Waterford.

What are they? Well, if you really want to know:

IN THE GARDEN…

Before the hedgerows and the woods start to wake up, gardening, which nature tends to resist as much a possible, yields an early sign of spring for me. The garlic that I planted just before Christmas has put out sturdy, dark green stems, each the length of my middle finger. And I have bigger hands than US president Donald Trump.

The garlic will continue to grow until harvest time comes in late July when, I hope, the weather will be dry and sunny. Before the advent of garlic, we’ve had the first cut of sprouting broccoli, bravely coming into flower during the dark days only to be cut off in its prime to produce a delicious vegetable treat when there’s little else apart from leeks and Jerusalem artichokes to be harvested.

And, as this happens, the rhubarb springs into life. Still too short to cut as yet, its small yellowish leaves are getting greener and the deep scarlet stems are getting longer.

The broad beans, meanwhile, sown in November according to the old gardening lore, have struggled up; they look rather cold and miserable at this stage but these sturdy seedlings will grow like triffids as soon as they have some mild weather and more exposure to daylight.

IN THE EVENINGS…

While the evenings may be getting brighter, there’s plenty of hours of darkness to be spent beside the fire. A gardener’s pleasures in early spring is to pore over the seed catalogues dreaming up optimistic schemes, discovering new varieties (and sometimes old, unusual ones). Imagining what that cucumber or tomato or baby turnip will be like when it’s ready for picking brightens up the early spring evenings. It’s a time, too, for consulting my old gardening books (some of them dating from almost a century ago) to get the benefit of advice from wise old cultivators of the soil. I read them, in a sense, like musicians read scores for pleasure.

IN THE TREES…

We have a lot of trees, several acres, in fact, of oak, ash, chestnut, beech, sycamore, larch, birch and Scots pine. Although the woodland has suffered badly from the winter storms (the bonus of which is a lot of firewood), the vast majority of trees are still standing. Now, in mid-February, all is quiet apart from the birds. The sycamores have tight, shiny buds, but otherwise all is closed up. The ash and the oak will play chicken with each other in terms of producing leaves.

And if the oak is first out of the traps, according to the old adage, we’ll be ‘in for a splash’. Which I suppose means that the summer will be even wetter than usual.

The brightest sign of spring is on the woodland floor, where the brilliant yellow celandines are just starting to bloom. Carpets of these little plants lie under a plantation of 90-year-old sycamores. When the wood comes into leaf and the shade becomes dappled, the first of the bluebells will then come out in April. These were planted at the same time as the sycamores, and they form a blue ocean so big that the scent, usually very subtle, becomes almost overpowering. As far as I’m concerned, bluebells mean summer can’t be far behind.

IN THE KITCHEN…

Having been cooking the overwintered vegetables – cabbages, kales, cauliflowers, root vegetables, leeks – and the brave sprouting broccoli mentioned above, for many months, spring arrives in our kitchen with the first of the wild garlic, or ramsons. Lots of it grows in our woods and we can pick baskets of the stuff which only seems to encourage growth. We cook it like spinach, make it into a frittata with a neighbour’s eggs, and use it instead of basil to produce a brilliantly green and deeply flavoured pesto.

It’s still a little early but there’s enough, at this stage, for a few small picks. By St Patrick’s Day, when, abiding by tradition, we will plant the early potatoes, it will be here in abundance.

IN THE HEDGEROWS…

The first thing to bloom in along the ditches and field boundaries is the wickedly armed blackthorn, its little white flowers jumping out like sparks against the grey-black tangle of branches and old brown seed-heads. It’s just starting now while the elder is showing plump buds which very soon will burst into leaf. Both plants will produce fruit later in the year: sloes (for gin) and elderberries for putting into apple pies. The hawthorn is so dormant that it still looks dead; but not for long. In May, it will pump out its curious fragrance of both flowers and decay. Below, the first daffodil buds are bulking up; they will add a splash of yellow before the end of the month and I like to check them every day for progress.

IN THE AIR

In my schooldays, the start of the Rugby Schools Cups fixtures was a sign of the year turning. After a match at Donnybrook in Dublin, I would walk down to Sandford Road to catch a bus home. Opposite the stop there was an old chestnut tree in which a blackbird always sang, as if in protest against the failing light.

Today, as I write, there’s a fountain of birdsong outside my window. The volume has been turned up in just the last few days. Blackbirds compete with larks, blue tits with robins, jays with goldfinches. And behind all this is the cacophony of rooks and jackdaws and the thin whistle of buzzards high overhead.

That’s the music of spring for me. And the music of hope.