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.
The bigger trees – alder, ash, oak, sycamore – are still winter-bound, tight-budded and stoic, but the small, scratty elders clustered around the spring, as far from conventional ideals of arboreal beauty as it’s possible to be, are bursting into leaf. They are always first, and come May will be adorned in glorious bridal splendour. Witch trees they are, bent and wizened on the outside, ever youthful within. They offer scarlet elf cup fungi from their mossy bases, red as the apple presented to Snow White. I nibble one – it has a squeaky firmness and a light, nutty flavour.
The beauty of this spot is in its proximity to home. It is in the striations of light and shade. It is in the verdancy and vibrancy sprouting from rot. It is in the gleam of light on the rivulet of newly emergent water that flows away from the pool, through dense undergrowth, down the hill, under the railway, into the alder carr, into the river, into the sea, into the sky, into the rain, and on and on.
This is the shortest of pilgrimages. I’m 48 hours early for the equinox itself and find myself apologising out loud that I will be elsewhere on the day, but the response from the elders, the water and the sweet-faced flowers is reassuring.
The river has no beginning, only flow; and the year has no corners, only curves.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
