Field Notes: Spring’s Progress

In Cambridge now, we’re teetering at the peak of daffodils and cherry blossoms. But the colors started with the crocuses, with layer on layer of new faces emerging since then. Was this the beginning of spring, over a month before the equinox? Less tidy than the succession of flowers, many species of wind and cloud and sun flow through these early months, hybridizing winter and spring. But petals and their colors and birds with their eloquence won’t be ignored as they talk of the changing seasons. I’ve been taking notes.

Crocus and dwarf iris season

Newnham Garden, February: The bulb beds are a long river of purple—perfect diminutive irises, some the color of a watercolor winter sky, bruised dusky blue lightening to pale periwinkle in the upper petals; others dark violet, a perfect complementary field for the yellow licks streaking the lower petals. Crocuses, hearty open cups of red-violet, paling to the center where neon orange anthers and stigma flare up in loud invitation to the bees and flies who have begun to fly again—including a bumblebee who drags the crocuses to the ground with its weight, disheveling and bending the petals as it crawls indiscriminately over and through them. There’s still a scattering of snowdrops amidst the purple, and a few shocks of yellow—winter aconites.

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Storm aftermath season

Feb 6 After the morning of gray shedding itself down through the trees, I saw the light rise at the edges and I went out—rain still in the air but gentle, and the sun beginning to pry open the sky. I followed the stirrings and dark arcing of blackbirds and walked along the ivy while the birds discussed the loosening of the air and the brightening of the leaves. I turned toward the sun and saw all hedges and bare trees translated to constellations, dense as the Milky Way, but without the darkness. Strewn along the street at their feet, the broken mirror of the storm. Looking the other way into softer gray, a shy rainbow blushing its colors. And one diamond: an ivy berry holding rain. Birdsong spooling silver through the weave of drips; air clean and reminding me to breathe deep. Then I leaned against the door and wondered hard, is it wrong to want nothing from life but the play of warm light through water on trees? Is it right?

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Nesting season

Lime Kiln Close, February: I stop for a blue tit, and then quiet churrs draw my eyes to the top of a nearby tree, where a magpie has winged in with a twig, and there’s a nest, a loosely clustered bunch of twigs. Another magpie emerges from the ivy with a twig. They thread them in fastidiously, churring and chucking to each other, flying off alternately to harvest twigs from the ivy—loose bits, or do they break them off, I wonder? (I learn later that it’s the latter)—or farther to another tree, still calling occasionally. They don’t seem to mind me; no young yet. iBird says they mate for life, and they build a cup nest domed by a fortress of strong sticks with a hidden side entrance.

The lane, March: Jackdaws high in the walnut tree, breaking off twigs and dropping them, sometimes nibbling at the ends first—bugs? nesting behavior?

Squill and primrose season

Newnham Garden, February into March: the woodland beds are blue with little splaying bells, squills, Scilla. Are they named after the Greek monster, Scylla? I hope not; they’re too lovely. They share the beds with showy hyacinths, dense with color. In the courtyard, as well as on roadsides, the tall leafy stalks with a vague Dr. Seuss air are now bubbling with yellow cup-shaped bracts and blooms like beehive hairdos: Euphorbia.

Ascension Parish Burial Ground, March: pastel yellow primroses have emerged where we cleared grass during the winter to make way for them. A brimstone butterfly makes its way around the burial ground, for all the world like a primrose taken flight.

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Windy season

Feb 23 Wind chases the sun along down the lane. Two jets, like pale ivory dragonflies, cross obliquely in the sky, one trailing a long luminous wake with no end in sight, the other’s trail only a short puffing stream evaporating into the blue. Is this a difference between stratospheres, higher faster currents to scatter the false clouds? Three moments and the planes are gone, and only half the story left in the sky.

Feb 25 Gray lifts for pre-twilight: in the west, high currents frizz cirrus into a bright slow flow of scrim scales across the blue while blackbirds exchange liquid outpourings across the trees. (When I look up “mackerel sky,” Wikipedia tells me that clouds have species, Latin names and all. This is perhaps Cirrocumulus stratiformis. )

Mar 10 Aggressive wind has brought in the gray, whips down the drops; weather app tells me it’s a long haul, so I’m hunkering down mentally after seizing yesterdays’ sun. Four crows toss chaotically but with the look of casual recklessness in the swatch of gray between trees. Wood pigeons still forage the hedge outside my window, somehow untroubled.

Mar 11 A menagerie of weather today:

• gale force gusts amidst the steady strong flow of morning wind that whooshed me awake, having kept the trees up dancing all night.
• secretive veil of gray insinuating itself over patches of bright
• sun metal-bright on the feathers of tossing crows
• half a minute of hail, and later another
• spatters of rain and one heavy hush of windless downpour
• clear cool cloud-sailing golden hour (so I cycle to the Co-op for groceries.)

Mar 16 Pre-dusk: Sky is an unusual filmy silvery blue where the sun slants white and bright. A loosely scattered stream of gulls is winging through the white-blue, achingly beautiful on their scythe-wings, slinging themselves through the air with casual wicked grace.

Mar 20 Today the sun is tidal. I step from pool to pool.

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Blackbird soliloquy season

The lane and Newnham garden: Through the winter, blackbirds have lurked in hedges and ivy, fluting their quiet subsong, chirping sharp calls, or shooting their brassy whinnies across the near dark, following over the lawn in an arc of shadow nearly lost between blinks. I see them scurry cautiously along the hedgerow, pause with head cocked and tail lifted before the next quick flipping of leaves or gulping of ivy berries. Anyone who has heard an American robin chirp or watched them dash head-down from worm to worm on a lawn will recognize the relation—the same genus of thrushes, Turdus.

But in spring, blackbirds here take center stage, pouring out their amorous songs from treetops often well into the night.

Newnham Garden, Mar 16: Just the barest swirl of color left in the pale sky when I leave the dining hall, and two blackbirds are inventing (it would seem to me) for each other a liquid-metal language, extemporaneous silver forge-song in the dusk. I can just make out one bird on a brick ledge against the white Queen Anne trim. Trees gather blackness into their branches and the moon is a sliver while I listen. The song stops, only sharp bright chirps left, veering past me to a new perch.

Mar 19 On my break I go out to listen to the blackbird singing the blue into the sky and the sun humming in the daffodils. Right as I come out the family across the hedgerow is crunching onto the gravel drive in their growling car, and children and parent emerge fractious, wanting, misunderstood, wronged. Doors slam and slam. The blackbird sings over all the racket, confident in the importance of his own melodious noise, untroubled in his separate realm up there in the tree boughs and the sky. I straddle the two realms, cringing sympathetically to the human discontent, embarrassed to stand here overhearing it, but called to eavesdrop unabashedly on the song and the sun. So I wait out the humans to glean from the sky.

Daffodil season

March: Newnham is starry and buttery with daffodils. Wordsworthian daffodils, a tossing, gleeful crowd glowing all through the wildflower beds and streaming along walks, and a little cheerful patch in the lawn right outside my window. They drink the sun; it fills their petals as if they’re hoovering it through their trumpets. I’ve despaired of ever adequately capturing the field of gold in my phone camera, though closeups give some sense of the riches. The number of pictures speaks to my wonder, new every time I re-encounter the rafts of daffodils. Equally saturated with yellow are the forsythia bushes, which make me wonder if I’m dreaming when I’m caught by the surge of sun incarnate in a hedge. Between the daffodils now, Balkan anemones are opening their purple fringes. Under the hedges, wild garlic has opened pale, graceful 6-petaled flowers.

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Mud season

Mar 16, off Grange Road: Soft cloudy morning, cool jog past the rugby field along the boundaries of house hedgerows into the fields (trespassing? the man walking his dog turns out to look rather like the field’s farmer, talking farm business on the phone, but he doesn’t look my way as I pass), where mud and birdsong in the windbreak trees abound; puddles bright in tractor tread gouges; traffic on the M11 just across another field. I hop a fence and loop back into the West Cambridge Site—sleek buildings and commuter bike path—but first, one last tucked-away turn amid a patch of trees full of birds and their morning talk. I come back with the soles of my shoes doubled with mud.

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New garden season

March: I’ve joined the Newnham Garden Club’s efforts to build a permaculture garden in a lumpy unused lawn in the back of the college. I will give this place its own post. But for now, digging in the permaculture garden: the soaking savory smell of wild garlic like a hearty promise of dinner soon. Wondering what the badgers will make of our overturned soil and piles of sticks. I planted a tree for the first time, a pear tree. Spade battling flints—some sheared translucent gray, others knobby and earthy umber-orange; one soft lump of chalk. The flaking of cedar cones into piles of amber chips. A fat, fat worm—only it could flatten itself so it looked like a loose skin, deflated. Fingers into dirt and roots to pull up grass turf. Sweet musky soil drying on my skin.

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Flowering tree season

Late March: Cherry and plum trees are standing frothy white or pink among bare trees like angels and wood nymphs. They shower their petals furtively, like a miracle of snow from a cloudless sky. I stop often, trying to frame their creations against the space that they make so sweet for my eyes, but my camera doesn’t quite understand. I should stop trying, but the wind takes the petals so soon.

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Cambridge Botanic Garden, Mar 28: With time, booking availability and windy weather colluding against me I was afraid I would miss the crowning glory of spring at the Botanic Garden, the flowering Yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis). But today the cumulus of white blossoms was still in its prime, branches loaded with globes of barely blushing petals, drawing people like bees to fawn over and photograph the exuberance. There were other beauties too—yellow fritillaries, magnolia with their blowsy abandon, and the golden pools of forsythia, stunning even under cloud cover.

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As for the trees without showy flowers—maples, hazels—leaf buds are starting to show like quietly expectant stars on their tips. A few, like willows, are well into greening. But beautiful as they are, when the leaves return, I’ll miss the stark scraggly lines with the clear sky and wind translucent and hollow around them, their restless etching, the birds and the patterns. Like this: Walnut branches, glazed in cool gold, catch and cradle the soft silver of moon in its blue bed; a windward crow drifts black through the fractals. And like this: At nightfall, from a Newnham College Hall bay window, watching the pink streaks fade behind tree silhouettes and a single bird black on a branch, framed by a wavery pane.

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Rainbow season

Mar 25 Curtain of rain lifts and the sky sings golden, calling me out to find the greater miracle: a rainbow opening full-arced over the end of the lane. I chase it, not for gold, but to the college garden where Newnham will add its red-brick and daffodil charm to my photos. It’s as magical as I hoped, though my wonder is too quickly hobbled by my camera. I’m grateful to have these photos now to share with you (and I still get little dopamine hits for that brick, those colors). But what I remember is a glittering window of moments when, camera down, birdsong called me fully into the rain-washed vivid present: the last fading leg of the rainbow over the rooftops and the trees dripping and singing in the sun and my body thrilling with awe. Then I had to film it, trading the last fading seconds of perfection for a bottled version to return to when it was gone.

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These words are born of the same impulse: capturing spring in Cambridge before it’s blown away into something else. Hopefully I drink more deeply of it in the process.

Wordsworth, I think, would approve.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.