Rites of spring

Setting out from a rainy Wandsworth in March 1913, shaking loose a long winter, the writer Edward Thomas yearned for apple blossom and cuckoo flowers, “the perfume of sunny earth”, and the nightingale’s song.
Come March, we are all leaning towards the sun. But what set Thomas apart was that he thought of spring as a place, and he took himself off on his bicycle through Surrey, Hampshire and Wiltshire towards the Somerset coast to meet its arrival.
Inspired by Thomas’ book In Pursuit of Spring, writer Matt Collins heads off to Pembrokeshire, a place he has visited every year of his life, and a place that is “redolent with the smell of warmed bracken and haw blossom”.
For Collins, what makes Pembrokeshire special is its abundance of habitats for spring to play out on. It may be one of the smaller national parks, but it has everything: cliffs, estuaries, rivers, moorland, marshland, hills and heath.
And it has the Tenby daffodil - “a seasonal starting pistol” that heralds the arrival of stitchwort and wood anemone, the sweet scent of coconut gorse and the softly plumped petals of magnolia and tulips. Added to this colourful backdrop is a cast of thousands - auks, guillemots and razorbills returning to their precarious cliffside nesting spots; the world’s largest colony of Manx shearwater; and the nation’s favourite seabird, the puffin, waddling against a backdrop of violet bluebells and frothy campion.
“If ever I long for vernal brightness, it is always this coastline that beckons,” Collins writes, “and a feeling that winter is long past”.