Welburn, North Yorkshire: The wood is greening with wild garlic and dog’s mercury, studded with celandines, violets and primroses

Spring is rising in the wood outside my house. And a spring is also rising in the wood outside my house. The former draws me out early, the air night-chilled, but the light so bright and the birdsong so emphatic that I can’t resist. The latter is not a limpid pool, not a chuckling rush, but a depression where water wells so gently that the surface barely ripples. It lies over a bed comprising decades of accumulated leaf mulch. It’s black and squelchy, and the slightest disturbance stirs the muck, so I don’t approach often.

Around the spring equinox is the time to go, the wood greening with wild garlic and dog’s mercury, studded with celandines, violets and primroses, and before the small, fierce nettles become guardians as tall as I am. I could cut them back, but this is not a garden.