A Letter to May

The Calendar Year may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link on this page. 
This website is for inspiration purposes only. The content provided is meant to spark creativity and ideas, not to serve as professional advice or as endorsement.

Posted at the turn of the month | From Nicky at The Calendar Year

April did what April always does.

It couldn’t make up its mind. Bright one morning, sulking by afternoon, and then suddenly – just when you’d given up on it – a day so warm and clear it felt like a promise. I fell for it every time. I always do.

There were moments in April that felt genuinely tender. The first time I sat outside with a hot drink and didn’t immediately want to come back in. Finding a patch of primroses on a verge I walk past regularly and somehow never noticed before. The evenings getting longer so gradually and then all at once, so that one day you realise with a small shock that it’s still light at half past seven and something in you quietly relaxes.

That relaxation. That’s what I want more of.

So before May arrives and I’m already rushing through it – here’s my letter.

What I’m Leaving Behind in April

April gave me the garden waking up April gardening / In the Garden – cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence. Bulbs I’d forgotten were there. The first green shoots of things I wasn’t sure had survived winter. That specific gardening feeling of relief that is really a kind of thankfulness.

I made a hot cross bun situation in Easter week April baking / The Seasonal Oven that was more of an event than a recipe – the kitchen warm, the house smelling extraordinary, the results were imperfect and entirely worth the effort. Some things are worth doing badly. Which is a saying I hang on to when it comes to the kitchen.

I read more than I expected to April books / Reading the Season – I read A month in the country by J L Carr, a novel I’d been avoiding because I knew it would make me cry, which it did, which was fine, which was actually the point. April is a good month for books that crack you open a little. Something about the season allows it.

Hello, May

May arrives like it’s been waiting impatiently in the wings.

Everything happens at once. The blossom erupts. The bluebells appear almost overnight. The hedgerows fill up with such speed and extravagance that it feels slightly theatrical – as if the natural world has decided to stop being subtle about it. After months of bare branches and muted colours, May just opens its arms.

I find May almost overwhelming in the best possible way. It’s the month I most want to be outside and most want to be still and most want to pay attention, all at the same time. It’s also the month that tends to get busiest – half term, bank holidays, the calendar suddenly crowded – and I always feel the tension between what May is asking me to do and what everything else is demanding.

This year, May wins. At least some of the time.

Here’s what I want to notice.

📖 Reading the Season

May is a month for reading outside May books / Reading the Season.

I want a book that earns its place in a garden chair – something absorbing enough to keep me there for longer than is strictly sensible, but gentle enough that I can look up at intervals and not lose the thread. A novel with good sentences and a strong sense of place. Or a book about the natural world – something that makes me more curious about what’s happening beyond the page. I might try Nan Shepherds’ The Living Mountain.

There’s a whole category of writing I think of as May books: the ones about rambling and botany and old British landscapes, about people who paid very close attention to small things and wrote it all down beautifully. I want one of those. I might try Nan Shepherds’ The Living Mountain.

I’m also keeping a poetry collection within reach May poetry / Poems for the Season because May produces more poems than almost any other month and there’s a reason for that. The world is showing off. You might as well have words that are trying to keep up.

What’s on your May reading list? Tell me in the comments.

🌿 Out in Nature

May is arguably the single most spectacular month in the British natural calendar May nature / Out in Nature and I will not be taking that lightly.

The bluebells are the main event. There’s a wood I visit every year specifically for them – a proper ancient woodland bluebell wood, the kind where the colour seems to hover just above the ground like a lilac mist and the smell is something you can’t describe to anyone who hasn’t stood in it. If you have a bluebell wood within reach this May, please go. Take someone you love, or go alone. Either way, stand still in it for longer than feels necessary.

Beyond the bluebells: cow parsley is foaming along every lane and hedgerow, hawthorn blossom is out in clouds of white – May blossom, it’s called, because May is exactly when it appears – and the horse chestnuts are putting out their candles, those extraordinary upright flower spikes that look like something from a fairy tale.

I also want to notice what’s happening underfoot as much as overhead [link: May nature journalling / The Nature Journal] – the ground ivy, the herb robert, the small unremarkable plants that do extraordinary things if you look at them properly.

🐦 Birds of the Month

May is one of the best months of the year for birds May birds / Birds of the Month and I intend to make the most of it.

The dawn chorus reaches its peak in early May – that extraordinary wall of sound that starts, absurdly, at around four in the morning and builds into something that makes you feel humanity has badly miscalibrated its relationship with daylight. I want to get up for it at least once this month. Not every day. Just once. Just to hear what the world sounds like before we all get up and start making our own noise.

The swifts should be arriving this month – those impossibly aerodynamic birds that spend almost their entire lives in the air and whose screaming calls over rooftops are one of the most unmistakably summery sounds I know. The first swift sighting of the year always feels significant. A proper seasonal marker.

Keep an eye out too for spotted flycatchers, garden warblers, and if you’re very lucky, a cuckoo – increasingly rare now, which makes hearing one feel like a small gift.

🌙 Looking Up

May nights are getting shorter, but they’re still dark enough to be worth going outside for May night sky / Looking Up.

This month I’m particularly interested in the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, which peaks in the first week of May. These meteors are debris from Halley’s Comet – which feels like a remarkable thing to sit with on a clear night. The particles burning up in our atmosphere are pieces of something that has been orbiting the sun since before recorded history. I find that an enormously useful thought when I’m getting worked up about something small.

The best viewing is in the hour or two before dawn, looking southeast. A blanket, a reclining garden chair, and no phone screen for at least twenty minutes beforehand to let your eyes adjust to the dark.

It’s worth it.

🍳 From the Seasonal Kitchen

May is when the seasonal kitchen starts to feel genuinely exciting again May recipes / From the Seasonal Kitchen.

Asparagus season is the headline and I take it seriously. The British asparagus season runs roughly from late April to midsummer and it’s one of those things that tastes so much better fresh and in season that buying it out of season from another continent at Christmas makes no sense to me at all. This May I want to eat it simply – with butter, or with a soft egg, or just on its own with good bread – at least twice.

Jersey Royal potatoes are also properly here now, and if you’ve never had them just boiled with a little mint and an unreasonable amount of butter, May is the month to correct that.

For drinks May drinks / Something to Sip, I want to try making elderflower cordial if I can get to the elderflower before it’s fully over – it’s right at the start of its season toward the end of May and the window is short. There’s something lovely about making something drinkable from something you found rather than bought.

And for baking May baking / The Seasonal Oven – something with rhubarb, while it’s still pink and sharp and at its most interesting. A crumble, probably. I always come back to the crumble.

✂️ Make Something

May’s craft intention May crafts / Make Something is to finally do something properly with the natural world rather than just admiring it from a slight distance.

I want to try botanical printing – pressing flowers and leaves directly onto fabric or paper using their own pigments. It’s a technique I’ve been meaning to try for two years and this is the month, because the material is right there and I have no more excuses.

The other project: a pressed flower bookmark collection. Simple, meditative, requires almost no equipment, and produces something genuinely beautiful. May flowers press particularly well – pansies, primroses, forget-me-nots, the tiny faces of violas. I want to make enough to give some away.

These are both the kind of crafts that look like I’ve planned something elaborate but are really just an excuse to sit quietly with flowers for an afternoon. Which is, frankly, the whole point.

📓 Words & Wondering

May’s journalling prompts May prompts / Words & Wondering include one that I keep returning to:

What has quietly arrived in your life this season, the way spring arrives – gradually, then suddenly?

I love this question because it works on multiple levels. It’s asking about the inner season as much as the outer one – what’s been growing slowly in you, what’s finally coming into bloom, what you’d been waiting for without quite knowing you were waiting.

The other prompt I’m sitting with: What do you want this summer to feel like? Not what do you want to do. What do you want it to feel like. That distinction matters.

I’m writing mine outside this month May nature journalling / The Nature Journal, in whatever the weather permits. Even if that means a notebook balanced on my knees on the doorstep while it drizzles slightly, which is an extremely British form of being at one with nature and I’m entirely at peace with that.

What’s your May question? Leave it in the comments – I read every one.

✨ The Stars This Month

May sits almost entirely in Taurus season before transitioning into Gemini around the 21st May star signs / The Stars This Month.

There’s something fitting about Taurus presiding over most of May – it’s an earth sign, deeply connected to the physical world, to pleasure, to slowness, to the senses. Taurus notices how things feel and smell and taste. Taurus would absolutely stop to smell the roses. Or the hawthorn blossom. Or the bluebells.

The shift into Gemini as the month closes brings a different energy – curious, social, quick-moving – which coincides neatly with the world speeding up again after the long bank holiday weekend. Notice if you feel that shift. I always do.

🌱 Tend to Yourself

May’s wellness intention May wellness / Tend to Yourself is simple and slightly countercultural: I want to do less.

Not nothing. Just less than the season seems to demand. May is full of events and obligations and the social calendar waking back up and everyone wanting to make plans after the long grey months – and all of that is genuinely lovely, but it can sweep you past the very thing May is best for, which is standing in a bluebell wood doing absolutely nothing useful.

One practical thing: I’m going to try eating seasonally for the whole month – letting what’s actually available guide what I cook, rather than planning meals and then buying ingredients. It sounds simple and is actually a genuinely different way of relating to food and to the time of year.

The other intention: morning light, before screens. Just ten minutes outside in the morning light before the day begins. The light in May is extraordinary and I keep wasting it by looking at my phone. Not this month.

📸 Capture the Season

May is almost too beautiful to photograph because you’re never sure where to point the camera May photography / Capture the Season.

My intention this month is to focus on close-ups rather than landscapes – the individual rather than the panoramic. The single bluebell stem. The texture of hawthorn blossom. A bee on an apple flower. A raindrop on a new leaf.

There’s a discipline in choosing the small thing over the sweeping view. It forces you to look differently. And the results are often more interesting – more intimate, more specific to this particular May rather than any May.

One rule I’m giving myself: no filters. May doesn’t need them.

🏡 A Seasonal Home

May is when I finally stop pretending the house shouldn’t have flowers in it May home decor / A Seasonal Home.

A jar of something from the garden or the hedgerow on the kitchen table. A bowl of tulips that are past their best but still worth having. The windows open. The lighter blankets out. The heavier ones put away with a small ceremony of optimism that we probably won’t need them again until October.

I also want to do a proper seasonal clear and refresh this month May decluttering / Clear the Clutter – not a full declutter, just a shift. Winter things away, summer things out. The house should feel like it knows what month it is.

An Invitation

This is my May. Bluebells and asparagus and meteor showers and botanical printing and the dawn chorus at least once, ideally not regretting it.

I’d love to know what you’re planning to notice. What’s calling you outside this month? What are you making, reading, cooking, or hoping for? Leave a comment below – or if you arrived here via the newsletter, hit reply and tell me directly.

May is the most generous month of the year. Let’s meet it properly.

Explore everything May has to offer →

Want a letter like this in your inbox every month? It’s completely free → Join the Seasonal Circle