Seasons

A great deal of British landscape photography depends on windows two or three weeks wide, and most of the disappointment comes from arriving on the wrong side of one. Bluebells flower in the gap between warm soil and a closed canopy, and that gap moves by a fortnight between Hampshire and Northumberland. Heather is three different plants flowering on three different dates, pulled further apart by altitude and by the burning rotation on the ground. Neither is guesswork once the mechanism is understood.

The entries here are written to be used year after year rather than read once. Each one gives what causes the timing, what shifts it, which conditions suit the subject when it arrives, and what the weeks either side are good for, since the fortnight before a flowering and the month after it are usually empty of photographers and full of subject.