March In Abbey Dore by Liberty Nimmo.

The seasons may be shifting but March is refusing to make it easy. Liberty Nimmo writes from her Herefordshire cottage on the knife-edge weeks between winter and spring.

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March 2026

Liberty's Dog, Hatt (The White Knight)

These weeks in March have hung on a knife edge. Now, I am ready to cast off my thermals and reach for the sun cream and, a moment later, the fire is lit all day and the hatches remain battened against the driving wind and rain. Life can be so full of contradictions and it seems that March this year is proving to be no different. The first glimpse of daffodils begins like a rare discovery, ditto the cherry blossom. And then, seemingly within a day, they transform into a check-list; daffodils become old news, snowdrops are now well in the past, cherry blossom is two-a-penny and the ‘Teacher Teacher’ call of the great tit and the robin are matched with the chiff chaff, dunnock, blue tit, willow warbler, woodpecker and even the curlew. The movement from rare sighting to commonplace is devastatingly quick. I don’t want to take these things for granted, especially after the long wait of the winter, but it appears that the natural world has intentions other than meeting my steady, carefully paced hopes for Spring.

My circadian clock is not quite there yet either as I’ve been struggling to meet the early morning light and I continue to drag around leftovers of the winter fatigue like yesterday’s sandwich in my pocket. That said, when the sun does appear, the fatigue slides away, retreating with the cold and the dark. It is replaced with a sense of Victorian industriousness that makes yesterday’s tiredness feel not unlike the flowered snowdrops; a thing well lodged in the past. Tomatoes, lettuces, spinach, chard, kales, broad beans, peas, aubergines, garlic, fennels and a vast array of cut flowers have all been sown (I know, yet another extended Spring list) and I am eagerly awaiting that magic moment, now hung in timelessness, for their emergence.

And speaking of time; today marks the Vernal Equinox, the extraordinary moment where day and night are held perfectly in balance before the light begins to pull away. The Equinox makes me think of our ancient ancestors; for the Celts, it formed part of the Wheel of the Year; the Druids called it ‘Light of the Earth’, and Ostara—credited with the root of the name Easter—lingers behind it. I imagine their celebrations with fire, their castings off of the old, the joy they felt knowing that everything begins to push forward again from here on. How did they feel about the pace of these weeks? Was it all stop-start or just one single beginning for them? I can feel a quiet balance emerging and wonder if it now marks the end of these knife-edge weeks.

In the garden at my cottage in Herefordshire, my diary has reported many an hour of ‘made another woodchip path.’ These past few weeks of self-imposed toil have included terracing and levelling off a section of the garden, which, until now, has been too steep for any cultivation. I have been shifting soil, making woodchip paths and filling newly levelled beds with compost. Like so many of my efforts, it is a little gung-ho and time will tell as to whether I should have built the darned gabion wall instead. It is however a gentle step towards the sign reading ‘unknown possible consequences’ – the sometimes alarming, but always necessary direction my home and garden creation seems to pull me in.

I have picked and dried the newly emerging herbs too; cleavers, nettles and the first of the fennel fronds, whilst keeping a keen side eye on The White Knight – my Parson Russell Terrier – who has seemingly sprung into action. Without looking back, he has cast off the boiled wool coat that he likes to wear over the winter and has taken to digging holes in the garden, a sport which I don’t hugely welcome but am being forced to accept. With the gusto and determination that only a terrier knows, he has resumed his nightly border patrol duties around the house and garden and, as a result, has shed his winter excess in just a few days. For him, Spring is moving in one direction only and I can’t help but admire him.

Now that the Equinox has passed, I do need to stop fearfully carrying my thermals about the place and finally commit to the cause. And so, I am resolved – it is The White Knight’s lead I will follow. Plus, that seminal moment of the first lawn mow has taken place. The sap is rising.

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