GUEST SPEAKER

For some, spring is a time for big renewals. But keen gardener Alice Vincent has discovered that sometimes the biggest changes start in small, slow ways

Alice Vincent believes spring is the perfect time for small changes

GARDENERS SENSE THE SEASONS BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE.

For those unfamiliar with the earth, March may still be a cold, wet thing – a winter coat-wearing time – but for us, it could be crocuses or muscari, little bursts of colour to usher in those sunnier mornings. There will still be ice on the ground, but less of it. The soil is just ready to plant sweet peas, which tend to flower around the summer solstice.

When I first started to learn about growing things, and how that process intertwines with nature, I realised that the tiniest efforts would pay off if you made them with enough perseverance. Spring arrives with a familiar encouragement to shrug off the trappings we’ve gathered to get us through winter. Have a clear-out, shake off the shackles of your old job, relationship or wardrobe. Switch your lipstick, at the very least. Brighten yourself up. Be a new you.

But the thing is, nature has been doing this every year for far longer than we’ve been around. The sun stays out longer, the earth warms up. Rain comes in heavy, warm showers to be guzzled by the seeds and corms that have been waiting for months, sometimes a year or two, to be woken up and put out new life. We’re so busy, sometimes we barely notice it.

Imagine, though, if we did the same this spring. Instead of grasping for grand changes, we made smaller, more meaningful ones. If we patiently considered the things we had left dormant over winter – maybe even for a year or two – and picked them up, dusted them down and made them anew. Not grand plans, necessarily, but the pieces of life we leave on the side and at the bottom of the to-do list.

A few specific ideas: calling up an old friend on a quiet evening, going through your diary and setting aside a couple of hours a week for yourself – whether that’s taking a long bath, switching off social media or embarking upon the book that has gathered dust on your bedside table. Or googling the ingredients you really want to eat and finding a new recipe, then cooking it, at a time when you don’t need to impress anybody with what winds up on the plate.

We so often set ourselves challenges that don’t fit into our already stretched lives. We’ll sign up to a gym, then chastise ourselves for not going three times a week.

We’ll launch strict diet plans, rather than simply giving almond milk a go next time we do the weekly shop.

Perhaps you could try, instead, to think of how the other significant life changes took place. Maybe your oldest friendships are those that built up slowly, over several years; perhaps that person was on the periphery of your life until you needed each other. The habits we nurture, the relationships we rely on, these are life-changing things that are developed only with time.

In nature, renewal doesn’t happen fast because it can’t: a plant that grows too quickly looks impressive, but its stems are weak – one hint of a disease and it succumbs. A push to make something happen too quickly, say, with too much fertiliser, will force it to die or fall under its own growth. It’s the slower growing plants that come back in the spring. They can take a couple of years to reach their best and put forward flowers, but each time they do, they offer an enchanting reward for those who have given them the space to turn brown and die back over winter. The first bloom of the year may look showy, but really, it’s a transformation that has been a whole year in the making – the product of tiny, imperceptible changes, all made with patience.

Alice Vincent is a journalist for The Telegraph and the author of How To Grow Stuff: Easy, No-stress Gardening For Beginners (Ebury)

‘IMAGINE IF WE MADE SMALLER, MEANINGFUL CHANGES’