For me, spring always begins when I dust off old literary gardens and use them as a source of inspiration while planning my real life garden. My annual lovely garden always begins in my mind in the spring time. I often think of an old Alfred Lord Tennyson poem:

“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
Hold you here, root and all in my hand,
Little flower, but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God and man is.”

Another naturalist, John Burroughs, had a different slant on when spring begins and ends. He said,

“ Spring begins, when the partridge drums, when the hyla peeps, when the shad starts up the rivers, and the grass greens in the spring runs; and it ends when the leaves are unfolding and the last snowflake dissolved in midair.”

Regardless of when the exact moment is, I’m just glad it’s here, and more or less thinking that in the spring, the motto of all flower-lovers should be Robert Browning‘s quote, “Look thou not down, but up.” — since the trees are often the first to present their flowers.

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