Have you been watching the Chelsea Flower Show this week? Perhaps you fought your way through the crowds on the site itxelf. Several of the good folks who came to our gardening club plant sale yesterday were keen on the idea of naturalistic planting and pops of colour. Planting for pollinators all year roundis much more popular these days. Those of us who grew up with cottage gardens, where veg nestled cheek by jowl with cutting garden flowers would have felt right at home at Chelsea this year. May really is a great time for a flower show and a plant sale.

"May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope" wrote Emily Brontë and that is certainly true in my garden. Whilst the spring bulbs have gone over, everything is lush and green. Perennials are reappearing to fill every available space; there are plenty of seedlings to plant out; the dahlias are underway; paeonies are blooming and, if I’m lucky (or vigilant), the roses are free of blackspot and greenfly for a while. 

I popped into the new Grow for Life garden up at the local hospice on my way back from school this week to scope out the site for my new little cutting patch and got myself stung by the patch of nettles growing at the gateway. It was my own fault - dressed for an exam briefing/motivational speech to year 13 prior to their first A Level exam rather than gardening. This is one week when we should be celebrating nettles and can legitimately pretend that any nettle patch in allotment or garden is by design rather than default.

It’s Be Nice to Nettles Week, a “vibrant annual event that shines a spotlight on the humble nettle plant” and encouraging us “ to appreciate the ecological and health benefits of nettles”. May is all about wildness rather than cultivation with No Mow May as well as this celebration of nettles, so I am leaning into it.

It’s been the best year for our front garden laburnum tree. I planted it not long after we moved into our current home and despite its deserved reputation for being beautiful but poisonous, it was a deliberate choice.

Full disclosure: this was the house I never wanted to move into. There is a particular grief in moving to a house you didn't want. Not the grief of loss exactly; more a persistent ache of resignation, of accepting that life will be different from the one you had planned. There is nothing wrong with our house in purely practical terms. It is absolutely fine. The rooms are fine. The street is fine and not too busy. The neighbours are friendly. It’s a short walk into town and to school when the children were little. Everything is fine. But fineness, when you had wanted something else entirely, can feel gently suffocating. Like living in a a world of pastel shades when you want jewel colours.

In April the tulip is centre stage in many gardens. “In my plot no tulips blow” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson and I can relate. Tulips are one of the world’s most recognisable flowers, found in many people’s homes and gardens. So beautiful -  until they are past their best and flop over in the border in the messiest of ways. Who needs that level of stress? But it is hard to resist their beautiful colours and shapes when the bulb catalogues drop onto the doormat in July.

April is one of the best times of year in my garden.

There are weeks when the universe is determined to lead you somewhere. This was one of those weeks. On almost every day and in numerous ways I have been confronted by signposts. They’ve popped up everywhere, quite literally.

It started with a casual remark on the radio by someone about ‘significant signposts’ in their life.

Back in the dark ages of the 1970s (quite literally, if you remember power cuts and the three day week), teachers could happily run with a child’s natural curiosity and set open-ended projects as valid educational experiences. My passion of the moment was wild flowers and plants, whilst my desk neighbours were big into beef cattle and rugby. (It was rural Wales, after all). I spent every spare minute for six weeks roaming the lanes and fields, collecting flowers, pressing them, sketching and photographing them on my Kodak Instamatic camera.

As well as the obvious benefits of being able to do independent research on something I loved I remember those weeks in Spring as being a golden time. Was it a case of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles or was something bigger at work there? I’m still a researcher and so I did what comes naturally and found out. It turns out I’m onto something.

Standing in silence with a few others this morning in an ancient churchyard, surrounded by birdsong, primroses and daffodils as the sun rose and the flames flickered in a nearby firepit put me in a thin place. It is easy to imagine many generations doing the same on Easter Day at dawn. It was a moment of connection.

To the Celts ( of which I am one) thin places were those where the presence of a higher being/heaven/creative force is almost tangible. Places where you feel an energy or spirit greater than yourself. Something beyond words, where the ordinary and the extraordinary intermingle. A place where the boundary between the physical world and a mystical or spiritual one is believed to be exceptionally thin, thus facilitating a moment of connection between the two. In thin places you may find your imagination ignited by thoughts of what has been before you.

March in the garden is truly transformational. By the end of the month the snowdrops are over, and the tulips have been joined by anemones and flowering shrubs. Larkspur and peonies are poking through and the roses are growing apace. Burgeoning is a good description. It changes daily but the one constant through the whole of March are the daffodils.

If ever there was a perfect flower for a Welsh woman’s cutting patch, the daffodil is it.

The Spring Equinox – day and night, light and dark in equilibrium – brings first a calmness and then a burst of energy. There’s a time for everything. Why fight it? Resolutions and good intentions to start projects are doomed to failure in the dead of winter when, surely, we are meant to hunker down inside, reflect and go slow? If you want to start a project, a good habit or make a change, now is the right time. You won’t want to fight it. Just go with the flow, the surge of energy and you’ll be pulled along.

So here are six simple ways to celebrate the season and establish good habits – one for every day of the week and a day off to just ‘be’.