It’s intriguing how rituals develop. They must persist without force or habit, and be alluring enough simply to keep happening, whether out of in-joke or necessity. The bottle of cheap wine that gets continually passed, unopened, around a group that gathers regularly for dinner. The particular order of activities that unfolds increasingly without discussion as friends meet up again and again.
My family is small and young (our son turned two with the vernal equinox), but we’ve developed a ritual of going away for the days when winter shifts into spring. We usually choose somewhere windswept and coastal, in the further reaches of the UK. Places of deserted RSPB-centre car parks with cash-only metres and hoping to catch the local fish of the day from the back of a van. Together, we blast away the depths of winter and charge ourselves up for the thud of spring. I always make sure to wild swim on the equinox.
This year, we went to Anglesey and fell in love. Wide-sweeping beaches against a near-mythical mountain backdrop. Wild ponies and drifting sunsets. Coastal-path walks and paddles before toddler bath time. As we roamed around the island I noticed the explosions of Salix caprea, otherwise known as goat willow or pussy willow. It is possibly better known in floristry terms for its silvery catkins (available only on the male plants), which perk up the cooler months with their soft, rabbit-like fur, but its spring party suit is a riot of yellow flowers, not unlike tiny bottle-brushes.
Salix caprea looks somewhat otherworldly but is native to the UK and much of Europe, where it has been traditionally used in Palm Sunday processions, palms being somewhat difficult to come by in the northern hemisphere in March and April.
I’m a lapsed Christian who doesn’t practise Lent or anything else much, but I’ve always been a sucker for the rituals inspired by Easter and the weeks preceding it. I grew up in the kind of village where we’d follow a donkey around the place, singing, on Palm Sunday morning. As a teenage chorister with many feelings, the candlelight and maudlin, a cappella arrangements sung at the evening Maundy Thursday service felt alluringly gothic. And on Easter Sunday a basket of Cadbury Creme Eggs was passed around for the children after communion – the only chocolate we were allowed to eat before lunch.
It was around this time that my mother started to bring curling branches of willow into the house, arrange them in a large earthenware bottle and hang painted eggs and small wooden rabbits from it. This was before the days of Pinterest and Google; I suspect she’d seen the idea in a copy of Good Housekeeping. Willow grows quickly – as anyone who has it in their garden will know – and over the weeks that the stems were in water I would watch them bud and leaf. Once the school holidays were over, the now-rooting stems would be planted in the garden, where they would become small trees.
I get deep cravings around this time of year to fill the house with flowers, specifically seasonal ones. Blousy, long-stemmed British-grown tulips. Tiny-headed white narcissus from Cornwall that pump out fragrance. Cheap supermarket pots of bulbs in the green that I plonk in salad bowls, cover in moss and stand in the sunny bay window. When we felled the ailing plum tree in the garden, days after my son was born, I decked the mantelpiece with its blooming branches. Each year I think about going to London’s New Covent Garden Market to spend money on chunks of cherry tree, to construct a small indoor grove. But my home is too small and my toddler too boisterous; this remains a ritual yet to be fulfilled.
One day, though, I will bring in stems of Salix caprea and put them in a large bottle, and their yellow pollen will gently shed all over some surface or other. And then I will plant them in the garden, and I’ll think of that trip to Anglesey.
[See also: Nothing inflames the imagination quite like the Shipping Forecast]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025