April Prompts: How To Find Creative Prompts To Try in April

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There is a specific shade of green that only exists in April. It’s the green of brand new leaves, so fresh and pale that they are almost yellow. It lasts for maybe two or three weeks before the leaves darken and toughen into their summer colour. If you miss it, you have to wait a whole year.

I missed it for most of my life. I knew it was there in some vague way. But I never really stopped to look at it properly until I started paying this much attention to the seasons. Now it’s one of the things I look forward to most in the entire year.

April is extraordinary. It is the month when everything that has been building since January finally arrives all at once. The trees leaf out. The hedgerows fill in. The countryside transforms from brown and grey to green almost overnight. It can feel like a miracle, even when you know exactly what’s causing it.

This is the fourth post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We’ve come a long way from January’s stillness. In April, the world is emphatically, loudly, visibly alive.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

April is a busy month ecologically. A lot of different things are happening simultaneously, and they are all connected.

The leaf burst, the technical term for when trees put out their new leaves, happens at slightly different times across species. Hawthorn is usually one of the first, then oak comes later, famously. There’s an old piece of British weather folklore about oak and ash, and which leaves first, predicting the summer’s weather. It’s probably not reliable forecasting, but it’s a nice reason to pay attention to which tree is doing what.

In the US, the timing varies enormously by region. In the South, leaf burst is largely over by April. In New England and the Upper Midwest, April is when it’s just beginning. The USA National Phenology Network’s Nature’s Notebook project is a citizen science programme where you can record and track exactly this kind of seasonal observation, and it genuinely contributes to scientific research.

Birds are nesting now. Many species are on eggs or have recently hatched chicks. This is why the dawn chorus is at its absolute peak in April and early May. Male birds are singing intensely to defend territory and attract mates. Early morning in April in almost any location with a few trees is genuinely spectacular.

Insects are returning, too. Bumblebee queens emerge from hibernation in early spring, and April is when you start seeing worker bees. Butterflies that overwinter as adults, like the brimstone and the comma in the UK, are on the wing. The first of the summer migrants are arriving. Swallows appear in the UK from mid-April. In the US, warblers are moving through in waves that birdwatchers track avidly.

Nature Journalling: The New Leaf

The new leaves are the thing this month. As I mentioned at the start, that pale yellow-green shade is fleeting and worth documenting.

One thing I’ve found interesting is to look at the same tree or hedge throughout April and note how the leaves change week by week. At the start of the month, you might see tight buds. By the end, the same tree could be in full leaf. That progression, tracked in a journal with sketches or descriptions, becomes a genuinely useful record.

It’s also worth looking at what’s underneath the new canopy. As the leaves come out overhead, the light reaching the woodland floor changes. Plants that need light in spring rush to flower before the canopy closes above them. Bluebells are the obvious example. But also wood anemones, lesser celandine, and various violets are all racing against the closing canopy.

Prompt: Find a tree that is in the process of leafing out. Visit it at least twice this month, ideally once a week. Each time, write a short description of where it is in the process. Sketch one leaf at each stage, from tight bud to fully open. At the end of the month, you’ll have a small record of something that usually goes completely unnoticed.

The iNaturalist app is brilliant for this kind of observation record. You can photograph what you find, and the community helps identify it. It works worldwide and contributes to biodiversity science.

Poetry: Bluebells and the Closing Canopy

April has some of the most beloved nature poetry in the English language written about it. Hopkins again is irresistible here. But also Edward Thomas, who wrote about the English spring landscape with an aching specificity that still feels entirely fresh. His poem Adlestrop is technically a summer poem, but his whole body of work is saturated with the kind of close seasonal attention we’re trying to practise here.

In the American tradition, Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d uses spring flowering as the backdrop for an elegy. It’s a long poem, but worth sitting with. Mary Oliver, as always, is worth returning to. Her April poems have an almost unbearable attention to what is actually there.

There’s also the Japanese hanami tradition, which peaks in April in most of Japan. The practice of sitting beneath cherry blossom trees and contemplating the beauty of something brief and falling is one of the most poetic cultural traditions I know. The word mono no aware, which roughly translates as the bittersweet awareness of impermanence, is central to how Japanese culture thinks about seasonal change.

Prompt: Go somewhere with flowering trees or bluebells or whatever spring flower is most present where you live right now. Sit with it for twenty minutes. Then write a poem about something that is beautiful, specifically because it won’t last. Don’t rush to a conclusion. Stay with the image and the feeling.

The Poetry Foundation’s collection of spring poems is a lovely place to read around before writing your own.

Photography: The Green Haze and the Bluebell Wood

April is one of the most photogenic months of the year. The light is good. The colours are extraordinary. And the subjects are everywhere.

The classic April photograph is bluebells, and for good reason. A bluebell wood on a calm day in April, with filtered light coming through the new leaves, is genuinely one of the most beautiful sights in the natural world. If you’re in the UK, the Woodland Trust’s bluebell map can help you find ancient bluebell woods near you.

But there are other things worth photographing that are less obviously beautiful and maybe more interesting for that. The underside of a new leaf held up to the light. A bee deep inside a flower. A nest, photographed from a respectful distance without disturbing the occupants. The reflection of a blossom in a puddle.

Prompt: Photograph something in April that you can only photograph in April. Something that will be gone by May. Blossom. A bluebell. A very particular shade of new leaf. Then write one sentence about why you chose that specific thing.

For wildlife photography ethics, particularly around nesting birds, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ guidance is worth reading. The equivalent in the US is the North American Nature Photography Association’s ethical guidelines.

Short Story: The Rush

April has an urgency worth exploring in fiction. Everything is in a hurry. Plants are racing to flower before the canopy closes. Birds are rushing to establish territory and a nest. Even the light seems to move faster.

Stories set in April can carry that energy. Characters making quick decisions. Things are changing faster than expected. Plans that seemed solid are getting overtaken by events.

There’s also something interesting about April’s unreliability. It can be genuinely warm and then drop back to near-freezing. It can be brilliantly sunny and then produce the most violent thunderstorms. It promises summer and then suddenly doesn’t.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 700 words in which the April weather plays a meaningful role. Not just as a backdrop but as something that affects what your characters do or decide. Maybe a sudden change in the weather changes everything. Maybe a warm April day makes a character do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done.

For reading short stories that brilliantly use landscape and season, the Irish writer Claire Keegan is extraordinary. Her novella Small Things Like These and her short story collection Antarctica both show a close attention to seasonal detail worth studying.

Drawing: Blossom in Full Bloom

April is the peak of blossom season in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Cherry, apple, pear, plum, hawthorn, blackthorn. The variety of blossom forms is remarkable once you start looking closely.

Drawing blossoms is challenging because the flowers are often complex and there are many of them. The temptation is to draw an entire branch, then get overwhelmed by the detail. I think a better approach is to start with a single flower. Just one. Every petal. The stamens. The way it attaches to the stem. Then add a second flower. Then a bud. Then a fully opened flower begins to drop its petals.

Prompt: Draw a single blossom flower from a fruit or ornamental tree. Give yourself at least half an hour. Try to include the stamen detail in the centre, which is often the most beautiful part. Then, alongside it, draw a bud from the same tree and a petal that has already fallen. You’ll end up with a small triptych of beginning, middle, and end.

For beautiful examples of blossom illustration, the Kew Gardens illustration archive is online and free to browse. The botanical illustrator Lizzie Harper has free tutorials on her website specifically covering flowers and botanical detail.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Asparagus, Rhubarb, and Edible Flowers

April is when the British asparagus season traditionally begins, usually around St George’s Day on the 23rd. Asparagus has one of the shortest and most specific seasons of any vegetable. In the UK, it runs from late April to midsummer’s day on the 24th of June. American asparagus seasons vary by region, but the spring harvest in the Northeast and Midwest is similarly brief.

Fresh asparagus is so much better than asparagus imported from elsewhere out of season; they are barely the same vegetable. If you can find locally grown asparagus this month, eat as much of it as possible. The simplest preparations are the best. Roasted with olive oil and salt. Blanched and served with hollandaise or just a soft poached egg.

Outdoor rhubarb is also properly here now, more robust and more tart than the forced variety from February. It pairs beautifully with orange, with ginger, and with strawberries later in the season.

Edible flowers are also beginning to appear, and they are worth knowing about. Nasturtiums, borage, violets, and dandelions are all edible and can be used to make salads look extraordinary or to make floral sugars and infused vinegars. For a thorough guide to edible flowers, BBC Good Food’s edible flowers guide is a good starting point.

Recipe prompt: Make something that uses fresh asparagus as the main event. Keep it simple enough that the asparagus is the point. Alternatively, make a rhubarb and elderflower cordial if you can find elderflower beginning to appear near you, or a simple rhubarb compote to eat with yoghurt and granola. The aim is to eat something that you absolutely could not eat in January.

One Last Thing

April moves fast. That’s the thing I want to leave you with. The window for the pale new leaves, for the blossom, for the bluebells is genuinely short. A couple of weeks at most for each one.

This series has been partly about training the eye to notice these windows. January taught me to look carefully at small things. February taught me to watch for evidence. March taught me to listen as well as look. April is teaching me that some things require you to actually stop and be present, because by the time you think about going back to look properly, they will be gone.

Go out this month. Take the twenty minutes. Sit under the blossom. Listen to the dawn chorus one more time before May changes the tone again.

I’ll be back in May, when everything has arrived, and the countryside is at its most lush and complicated.

Previously: March. Next month: May and the full green world.