Seasonal Notes - February 2026

April 20, 2026

Seasonal Notes - February 2026

I’ve never understood why people hate January and seem ok with February. Personally I like January. It is that one quiet moment in the year when you can actually stop and take a few breaths after the chaos of the ‘festive season’. The days are short, dark and cold. It is a time to light fires, snuggle up and give yourself permission to forget the outside world. There is little to do in the garden and everyone is partied out and clutching their purse strings after the excesses of the previous month or two. In short, it is the perfect time to play hedgehogs - just curl up in a ball under your duvet and hibernate! On the other hand, if it snows, then I’m right out there amongst it, revelling in all that beautiful white light, breathing in deeply the sharp ionic air and enjoying the muffling of noise that a blanket of snow produces. All becomes still, silent and monochrome - a perfect holiday for the senses - or dazzling against a sharp blue winter sky.

February on the other hand is my least favourite month of the year. I mean, what’s it all about? It’s not the beginning of the year, it’s not the start of spring and if it’s anything like this year it’s just the most horrendous barrage of winds, rains and grey skies. In short, quite ghastly. Yet because it’s not January and you don’t feel justified in hibernating any more, you shuffle out from under your duvet and feel obliged to do something. Inevitably this means something like clearing messy borders from the detritus of autumn if you never got round to it in November (which I didn’t because I was busy crossing an ocean in a small sailing boat for weeks on end). While slightly tedious, it is nevertheless rewarding - a bit like hoovering a messy floor. Instantly perks the place up a bit.

This year, however, the rain was so relentless that I spent more time in my potting shed faffing around with flowers than doing anything more useful. That meant planting up some bulbs in pots and baskets, some for outside, some for in, and gathering greenery (mainly vibrunum tinus) to put in old ceramic pots to brighten up the kitchen table and bring a sense (and scent) of the season indoors.

My little helper

One of the things you have to quickly learn if you embark on this gardening lark is that there will always be another job to do. So to enjoy the garden rather than become a slave to it, you have to practice restraint and learn to believe that tomorrow is another day. Far better to pop out and get a few key jobs done - a bit of tidying, a bit of planting or pruning, and then go for a potter, possibly notebook in hand, to admire your past efforts, the new life which is always emerging, and jot down ideas or tasks that need to be done at some point.

Today I grabbed just half an hour out of my day to go and do some gardening - my focus being to tidy up the vegetable patch from autumn leaves and last season’s growing debris, a job I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

As I went up the garden I took a moment to appreciate the bulbs that are up or coming up - namely the wonderful abundance of snowdrops which have been proliferating here over so many decades and which are scattered all over the garden from the main lawn, the borders, the base of trees, the edges of steps, between pavings and throughout the dell. Every year a new little clump appears somewhere.

I also noted the crocuses - not something I’ve had so much luck with - but they are slowly creeping their way into being noticeable. They crop up in places I’d long forgotten about - in the borders closest to the house as well as around the bases of trees and in wilder parts of the garden. Last Autumn, the girls and I had a merry moment planting more crocus bulbs around the bases of one of the big copper beeches and I was delighted to see that they are starting to appear in the mossy mound, to add to those closer to the trunk.

It is these small joys that keep me going through the month of February in the garden. When there’s no snow to raise my spirits from the relentless grey skies, wind and rain, the seasonal appearance of these dainty and humble harbingers of spring are enough to put a smile on my face and make me simply feel grateful for being present in this beautiful world of nature.