The Four Seasons

Over the next 24 pages, BSME Columnist of the Year and award-winning nature writer John Lewis-Stempel charts the changing year and we offer ways to enhance such pleasure in simple things

‘The blush of Spring, the blossom of Summer, the flame of Autumn, the sparkle of Winter, and the violet-softened refulgence of every waking moment yield a never failing succession of delights’ Horace Fletcher in Menticulture

‘The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other’ Arthur Rubinstein

‘Look to the seasons when choosing your cures’ Hippocrates

‘Nature bestows her own, richest gifts/ And, with lavish hands, she works in shifts’ Gertrude Tooley Buckingham in The Four Seasons

Riot of spring

Lambs gambol as ascending daylight warms their greening fields and the cuckoo calls in woodlands carpeted with dewy daffodils, bluebells and sorrel

SPRING sets in with its accustomed severity’: so goes the old country witticism. The shepherd on the black Welsh mountain and the ploughman on the open field of norfolk know from bitter-cold experience that the equinox, on March 21 or thereabouts, is a hasty human date for the official start of spring. Ask the shivery crews of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat race if March blusters and freezes—they will tell you.

And is that blossom on the blackthorn or snow? nonetheless, winter is now in its death throes. The ice age is over. How does nature announce the arrival of spring? Let me count the ways, but, slowly, because, at first, they come singly and separately. The crocus flowers. Woodpeckers drum on telegraph poles. Queen bees emerge from their burrows. The tiny chiffchaff arrives from Africa. George Orwell, an unacknowledged naturalist, considered the clinching evidence for spring’s arrival to be toads spawning.