Spring blows in wonderful winds of change

THE weather was colder than normal for much of April. I was preparing beds in my vegetable garden in the chilly midlands and when my hands were in contact with the soil for about 20 minutes they went numb. I didn’t need a thermometer to tell me that it was too soon to start sowing things.

Then a couple of weeks ago everything suddenly changed. The winds that had been blowing from between east and north switched to the quadrant between west and south and the soil started to warm up. Soil temperature in the spring always lags behind air temperature for reasons that have to do with the laws of thermodynamics. But sometimes it can catch up quite rapidly. Warm rain can heat cold, dry soil in the space of a few days.

What happens then, of course, is that instead of sowing turnip seed and setting out cabbage plants I spend the day cursing and trying to start a lawnmower that’s been idle since autumn.

Grasses are, in several ways, an unusual family of plants. Irish grasses will not grow until the soil temperature reaches between 5C-6C. But neither do they die —- they just bide their time. The other thing that will stop them growing, and eventually kill them, is a severe drought. Unlike most temperate plants, they are completely unaffected by day length and will start into growth in January if the soil temperature crosses the crucial threshold and there is sufficient soil moisture.

They are also unusual in that they will tolerate being mowed regularly —- if you eventually get the machine started. Regular mowing kills almost all other plants. Daisies only survive in your lawn because they can grow so close to the ground that they duck beneath the cutters. Mowing actually increases the vigour of most grasses because of what’s called the ‘tiller’ effect. This means that when a grass stem is cut it’s replaced by several new ones. Cereals are grasses and in some countries livestock are let in to graze young cereals to increase the yield. In the wild world outside the garden there is a pent up energy behind the late arrival of spring. It’s as if that period of cold weather had acted like a dam with water pressure building up behind it. When the sluices opened there was a torrent of growth.

The behaviour of the birds changed almost over night. During the cold spell all their concentration was on getting enough to eat during the day to see them through the frosty night to come. Now they’re taking time off to sing a lot — or, in the case of the cock pheasant in the field, to crow and beat his chest with his wings.

The beaks of the jackdaws are crammed not with food but with nesting materials. Robins and cock blackbirds are fighting a lot. A wood pigeon is already nesting in an old apple tree covered in ivy. It’s the same tree it used for cooing competitions with other wood pigeons a month ago. And now that the traffic light has changed to green the cow parsley along the lane is growing so fast you can see a daily difference. It’s smothering the last of the primroses and violets with its exuberance. The birch trees are not yet in full leaf but there’s a froth of green starting to cover the grey twigs. Every day I drive past a beech hedge and the plants in it are going green in patches. Spring is an exhilarating time of year.

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