Awaiting Spring’s Breath
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley
As the sun slips into the Northern Hemisphere, bringing days filled with more light than shadow, we finally bid farewell to the wet and stormy winter. Yet, Shelley's invocation of nature's dual power to destroy and renew resonates deeply as I witness the aftermath of winter in the hillsides and roads around me. Like the 'winged seeds' awaiting spring's breath, our landscape too bears the scars of a harsh season, poised for rejuvenation.
While thinking about how to write on this, I saw
from Writing Around The Edges announce her gentle book club (be still, my beating heart). When I read that the first book would be Weathering by , I realised that was the perfect word to describe what I have seen and felt. The earth and I have both weathered another winter. And while we’re ready to unfurl into an awakening spring with its promise of new life and energy, there is also a need to pause and reflect. Because there is much for us to learn.Weathering & Survival
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
An Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats
Nature is meant to weather winters. Much of the natural world exists within a cycle as we move through the seasons. For example, nightingales, like the one in Keat’s poem, migrate to warmer climates during the winter, then return to the UK’s forests to mate throughout spring.
Bats, dormice, and hedgehogs, feast during the plentiful months, fatten themselves up in preparation to hibernate throughout the winter when less food is available. They don’t just sleep. Their heart and breathing rates reduce and their body temperature drops to conserve energy.
Other animals, such as foxes and dogs will grow thicker furs to keep them warm during the colder months. I can attest to this as there is far less of Dexter’s fur to sweep up during the winter!
Then, there are our broadleaf, deciduous trees. They lose their leaves to conserve energy and keep water in their trunks. It also helps them to withstand the winds of the winter.
Nature knows how to weather our winters. And because of this, I have tried to take inspiration from it in the last few years, in an attempt to heed off the winter blues. I’ve embraced the Hygge way of living, curling up with copious amounts of fur-like blankets, nesting on the sofa with a good book or two. While there is no doubt this has helped, I’m now recognising that less movement and time outdoors has not necessarily benefited me.
This became even more obvious this year. While I used nature to recover from Long Covid, major surgery left me lying in bed, or on the sofa, for three months, akin to a dormouse in hibernation. This might have not been so bad had it happened in the winter. Instead, my operation was in September, effectively shifting my winter much earlier and significantly extending it.
By February, the smudged, dull grey skies felt suffocating, as if the rain clouds had stuffed themselves into every inch of me. Getting back out in nature has helped hugely, and I wish I had done it sooner. But it has also come with a new sadness as I began to notice winter’s own scars.
The Scars of Winter
Earth rais'd up her head,
From the darkness dread & drear.
Her light fled:
Stony dread!
And her locks cover'd with grey despair.
Earth’s Answer, William Blake
Blake's poignant poem depicts Earth's despair and longing for liberation. Its darkness, dread and despair resonates deeply with the winter scars I witnessed. There was both man-made and nature-driven destruction on display. And if someone had asked me before which of these I would find more devastating, then I would have said the man-made. But it was not to be so.
When I returned to my usual weekly walk through Delamere Forest in January, the land seemed desolated. The forest floor, normally coated in beech leaves and soft pine needles, was replaced with churned up mud and tyre imprints two feet wide trampling newly cleared areas. I have seen the same scars on other woodland landscapes, too, such as on the lower slopes of Moel Famau.
It was heart-breaking to see. But a quick online search told me that Forestry England had carried out timber harvesting work as part of their Forest Management Plan. Saplings grown in their nursery down the road would be planted to replace those cut down. Huge machinery churning up forests might make me shiver, but it was, apparently, part of a plan that secures the woodland’s future survival. And I’m looking forward to seeing the new, young trees flourishing. (Although, a book I’ve just ordered may suggest that it’s not as simple as this, and in fact, it’s damaging an entire eco-system and threatening our forests).
However, what has been far harder to observe is the damage created by nature. But let’s be honest.
Nature isn’t really responsible. We are.
She is only responding to human behaviour over the last few centuries.
Human scars
As I returned to my local hills, it was hard to escape the idea that I was witnessing the damage of climate change in real time. It left me with an unnerving sense that we have crossed a tipping point.
Our news is littered with reports of record-breaking weather events, destructive wildfires burning out of control, extremes in temperature, and devastating floods. But often, they can seem a world away.
Until small signs show up on your doorstep, and every place you visit.
In the photos below, you can see how rain water has run down the middle of the path, eating away at the soil and leaving a trail of sand. The sandy soil is softer, more prone to erosion, and therefore might seem insignificant. Except, not far away, is a deep red path near the Sandstone Trail, with a knee-shaking drop of around half a metre, where a great chunk of path has broken up and washed away.
While some paths deepen and slide down the hillsides, other land falls away. This example happens to be to the side of the path, and I wonder how much longer it will remain open. If you look closely, you will see the roots that remain where once there had been soil.
It’s not the only place where trees are losing the earth in which they grow. The photos below show exposed tree roots, like octopi tentacles stretching out, floating on the sea. Where once they had been buried below ground, the winter has now stripped them naked.
These trees may have weathered the winter, but I’m not sure they will survive another storm with roots exposed like this.
For so many of us, our natural environment is a valuable source of wellbeing. As it changes, I wonder what the impact will be on us. I can’t help feeling as though we will have huge regrets in the future for not acting sooner. But it seems we are so far down the path of destruction, the way back seems almost impossible. We’ve done too little, too late. But I don’t have any solution either.
As the land slips away like sand through my fingers, a weathering beyond what is natural, all I do is watch.
In horror.
Wondering if it’s already too late.
It’s Not Just the Natural World
And it’s not just the natural world that is getting washed away. Local infrastructure is affected, too. Many of our local roads are country lanes lined with farmland. While mud is part of the territory in winter, this year seems particularly bad. Every trip out leaves your car coated in it as it washes off the fields, on to the road and into drains.
Some flooded roads are inevitable. It happens every time it rains. But it was so bad this year, the council gave up and closed one of our roads for months. In a rural area, no diversion is small, and it was also one of the main routes in and out of the village.
And new floods seem to be popping up everywhere. Very near my house, there’s a section of the road that spent more time under water this winter, than above it. I don’t remember it flooding there before. At first, I thought it was a blocked drain. But when I walked past, I realised it was a field behind the hedge, so saturated with rain water, that it has nowhere else to go and is spilling across the grass verge and into the road.
In some areas, particularly the roads leading up and down the local hillsides, the sheer amount of water running down them is also eroding the roads. Just as soil is washed from the tree roots, lumps of road surface crumble away. There is a road I use regularly which now has a stream where once was the edge of a road.
The local Facebook group is abuzz on rainy days, with businesses and residents pleading for information on which floods are passable with care, and which are not. The village has come close to being cut off numerous times. It has become a real problem for many.
There are real societal impacts, too. Public transport is abysmal in this rural area. But the few buses that do run have often not been able to serve the community due to the flooded roads. Without a car, people become isolated. With the distance from the town centre, there are actually many local businesses, far more than you would expect for such a small area. However, these too, have suffered, especially those that are not online as customers struggle to get about.
As the community weathered this particularly wet winter, I got the sense that others, too, felt the neglect. The council was quick to move in more populated areas, but we are increasingly left to deal with it ourselves. It is often the farmers that come out to move people out of floods, or to remove trees blocking the road.
We have survived.
But many are feeling as though there is little care for areas like ours.
The Changing Seasons
The cold earth slept below,
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow,
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.
November 1815, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Let’s be clear. We are meant to have winters, and finding them a bit of a struggle is nothing new. But as Shelley’s poem demonstrates, winters are meant to be cold and chilling, with ice and snow. That has not been my recent experience.
And the evidence suggests this is not all in my head. Even a brief look at data from the Met Office reveals how the UK’s weather is changing:
“2022 was the warmest year on record” and “all individual months except December were warmer than average” (Met Office, 2023a).
“The most notable features [of 2023] were the record breaking temperatures in June, the exceptional heatwave in early September and run of named storms through the autumn and early winter.” (Met Office 2023b)
In February 2024, the southern half of England, “received more than twice the average rainfall widely, for some locations more than three times” (Met Office, 2024).
Locally, in the North West & North Wales, rain was 134% of the long-term average, with over 18 rainy days in the month and only 64% of the long-term average in sunny hours.
Perhaps, then, it is the combination of wetter, warmer weather and the lack of sunshine that has felt so heavy this year.
Most of us are aware that in the Paris Agreement in 2015, 195 nations agreed to keep global warming well below 2C, and to try and limit it to 1.5C. The 1.5C measure was widely seen as protecting us from the worst of climate change such as melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. But that didn’t mean it would be without consequence, especially if this level of heating was sustained.
Then, last month, news broke that we had reached that barrier. For the last twelve months, the earth was 1.5C hotter than in pre-industrial times. I suspect many of us were devastated by this news, but not entirely surprised.
The warmer, wetter weather that comes with climate change carries many risks for our natural world. Scientists and bird watchers have already noted differences in migration patterns. Higher temperatures risk animals coming out of hibernation before there is enough food to sustain them. The increase in storms and rain risk more flooding, land slides and upended trees.
I’ve no doubt that these changes will impact our wellbeing, too. Those of us with the winter blues may find there is less sun to brighten our day, and more rain to dampen it.
If ever there was a time for drastic action, it’s now. Because I don’t think anything but a drastic change in how we live our lives is going to be enough. I just wish I knew what to do and how to do it.
The Unfurling of Spring
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
But with the winter weathered, and a spring unfurling before us like a fresh, new leaf, I find myself wandering the vales and hills watching for the signs of spring like Wordsworth. Spring is always accompanied by hope.
I, too, am growing with balance and strengthen returning. I can feel the shift in my core.
A deep buzzing calling me to move.
A need to stretch limbs, pushing hands high into a salutation to the sun.
A pacing of feet, up, down and around.
Each time I pull on my boots and step outside, I notice a new sign of spring.
The clouds of hawthorn and blackthorn appearing almost overnight on the hedgerows.
On the heathland, new green shots rising from the ground.
The bright yellow flowers of common gorse shine bright, their coconut-perfume drifting on the wind. These can bloom as early as January, but there vibrancy sings spring.
On the other hand, the pink, plump flowers of a bilberry plant shouldn’t be seen until April, but these shelter amongst their leaves in early March.
The sun, now and again, peaks from behind the grey painted skies. There is even the occasional flash of a painted Mediterranean-esque azure sky.
There is joy on my face and a leap in my step.
Mother Nature has weathered another difficult winter in a changing landscape, and has produced a fresh spring. It is up to us to show her how much we cherish and love her. We need to find better ways to support her going forth.
Because as my bones grow older and my hormones wilder, I am more convinced than ever that spending time in nature, and doing everything we can to save her, is essential to our own wellbeing.
But for now…
Welcome Spring. Welcome. I love you already.
really loved the thoroughness of this piece <3
I love finding metaphors in nature. Bio-mimicry is also a cool exploration into innovative solutions that are based on what our earthmates in the animal kingdom do to survive and thrive in our world. Winter is a season that I love and hate because I have a hard time letting myself lie 'fallow' while I recharge and be re-energized for the coming spring!