Week 13

The return of the horse chestnuts

Hello!

It’s the final few days of March and also…the final few days before my Almanac 2025 deadline…eek! So this will be brief, before I plunge back into it. I will give you a round up of how it all went once the dust has settled and I have had a few days of staring into space and NOT typing. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about: I produce an annual almanac, and here is the 2024 edition)

This is our weekly post in which we, together, track the changing seasons week by week. I write about something I have noticed/eaten/smelt/watched on telly that felt particular to THIS WEEK in the year, and then you do the same in the comments, and then I combine them all into a big beautiful end-of-month poem (of sorts). Even though most of us are northern hemisphere temperate, we love it when people from other parts of the world join in - send us your equatorial flowerings, your southern hemisphere wildlife spottings, your arctic returnings of the sun. Everyone is welcome, just click on the comment button at the bottom of this post.

Here’s mine:

The return of the horse chestnuts

Despite the extreme closeness of my deadline I have been managing to briefly leave the house once a day or so, and in one of these forays out I spotted this: horse chestnut leaves starting to open (apologies for the delightful garages in the background…). They are always the first trees to look like ‘summer’, to open and spread their canopy full and wide while all the others are still putting out measly little green shoots. And here they come.

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That’s it from me. The Big Beautiful Monthly Poem will be arriving in your inboxes on Sunday so this is your last chance to add anything in for March. What have you noticed/spotted/baked/eaten this week that felt particular to this week? Leave your comments below.