February - Spring Stealth

Garden Notes February 2026 (posted start March)

I thought the garden was wintering, sitting calm and quiet and breathing in the white air, waiting, enjoying the sensation of slowness. I had got used to observing the crackle patterns of the black tree branches and twigs across the cold sky. In all these wet days nothing much changed - whether the rain heaved and slanted with the wind or the air moved with fine moisture there was wetness of different sorts but all saturation.

But it turns out, as it was reasonably mild, things have been moving at a pace. The weather being wet and grey means I haven’t been out in the garden much so on walking around it at the weekend I have been taken aback - the amount of bulbs that are rising up is suddenly immense; green shafts, architectural clumps determinedly pushing upwards; a shock of fireworks, the sensation of earth moving. While daffodils generally don’t really take to our earth (too good? too poor?) in the pot yellow cheerfulness, (a name both entirely apt yet also somehow disappointing in its unimaginativeness) have sprung up excited and proud and certainly cheering.

It takes years to learn your plants. The camelia in the pot had been settled for a season in that little corner and flourished – I thought it had made it through, so last year I put it into the sun, not that slightly dingy damp place of convalescence. But actually it loved that shelter there and having had a poor time last year I put it back in its favoured position which it turns out it loves - so now, all of a sudden, there with a colour so exotic, it’s bringing technicolour Summer to Spring.

At this early point in spring roses and clematis are shooting out little leaflets and clusters, on the move, reminding me, I better get rose pruning done. The grass is now shaggy and glinting with water. The hellebore are all out with such variety, even within their mauve and pale tonal ranges.

So it turns out the promise of spring is already more than a promise, at this far end of February.

But while some things come, others go, as time and light shift. The dawn chorus is moving away to 6.00 to 5.30 though we still have late sparkles in the air as we wake. The thrush has been making a dingy February the most wonderful thing, even on wet days, on top of his conifer spire; the grey sky is like a Gregorian chant, and his voice, a solo of Hildegard of Bingen, wandering, experimenting, returning, synthesising. But he too has moved off for a while - though I know he’ll be back a little later with the cycle of the Spring tides.