March Prompts: How To Find Creative Prompts in Early Spring

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March is the month that finally makes good on February’s promises. And then some. In fact, March can feel almost overwhelming if you’ve been paying close attention. Because everything seems to happen at the same time. The birds get louder. The trees start to blur green at the edges. The light shifts dramatically. The rain smells different.

After two months of quiet watching and small evidence, March arrives, and suddenly, there is a lot to notice.

I’ll be honest. I’ve always found March a bit chaotic in the best way. It contains winter and spring simultaneously. You can have snow and blossom in the same week. You can have a warm afternoon that genuinely feels like summer, followed by a frost the next morning. It keeps you on your toes.

This is the third post in a year-long series about paying closer attention to the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We started with January’s stillness and February’s first small signs. Now in March, everything is accelerating.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

The spring equinox falls on or around the 20th of March. This is the point where day and night are roughly equal in length. After this, the days are officially longer than the nights in the northern hemisphere, and the pace of seasonal change picks up noticeably.

But March doesn’t wait for the equinox to get started. By early March, the dawn chorus is already building. Birds that were quiet or absent through winter are returning or ramping up their singing. In the UK, this includes chiffchaffs, one of the first summer migrants to arrive, whose repetitive two-note call you start hearing in hedgerows and woodland edges. In the eastern US, red-winged blackbirds and song sparrows are among the early returners.

Trees are budding. Some are already in flower. Blackthorn is one of the earliest, producing white blossom on completely bare black branches before any leaves appear. It’s a striking and slightly eerie sight. Cherry and plum are not far behind in milder areas.

Underground, bulbs that have been waiting are pushing up fast now. Daffodils, crocuses, and tulips are appearing in gardens and parks. In woodlands, wild garlic is beginning to carpet the ground in places. The smell of it is one of March’s most distinctive features.

For a detailed guide to what’s emerging in UK woodlands specifically, the Woodland Trust’s nature calendar is brilliant. In the US, the US Forest Service phenology resources break things down by region and ecosystem.

Nature Journaling: The Dawn Chorus

If there is one thing I would encourage you to do in March above all else, it is to go outside early on a calm morning and just listen. The dawn chorus builds through March and peaks in late April and May, but March is when you first really notice it as a thing. As a collective sound, genuinely extraordinary.

You don’t need to be able to identify every species. And you don’t need binoculars or a field guide. You just need to be outside before or just after sunrise, ideally somewhere with a few trees or hedgerows nearby.

Prompt: Go outside at dawn on one morning this month. Bring a notebook. Don’t try to identify what you’re hearing. Instead, write descriptions of the sounds themselves. Is it a call high or low? Short or long? Does it repeat exactly or vary? Does it sound like it’s asking a question or making a statement? Write for at least ten minutes without stopping.

For help with identifying bird sounds after the fact, the Xeno-canto database has recordings of almost every bird species in the world, and it’s completely free. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app is a remarkable free tool that can identify birds by sound in real time.

Poetry: The Equinox and Equal Things

The spring equinox has attracted poets and thinkers across cultures for thousands of years. There’s something compelling about the idea of balance, about the two halves of the day being equal, even if only briefly.

Ted Hughes wrote a sequence of poems called Crow that engages with elemental seasonal forces in a dark and interesting way. On the lighter side, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some of the most viscerally alive spring poems in the English language. His poem Spring opens with an image of weeds and all things rushing and beautiful that feels entirely right for March.

In the Japanese tradition, March contains the beginning of the cherry blossom season in warmer regions, and the practice of hanami, or flower viewing, has its own rich poetic tradition. The idea of sitting with something beautiful and temporary is very March.

Prompt: Write a poem about balance. It could be the balance between two seasons, between warmth and cold, between light and dark. Or it could be something more personal. Try to avoid abstract language. Ground every image in something you can physically see, hear, or touch right now, in March, where you are.

The Poetry Foundation’s archive has Hopkins’s “Spring” in full, along with many other seasonal poems worth reading for inspiration.

Photography: Blossom and Mud

March presents a lovely photographic challenge. Because you have extraordinary beauty alongside genuine mess. Blossom appears over muddy paths. Bright green shoots are pushing through dead brown leaves. Everything is slightly dishevelled and bursting at the same time.

The temptation is to frame out the mess and just photograph the blossom. But I think the combination is actually more interesting and more true to what March feels like. The contrast is the story.

Light in March is getting better by the day. The sun is higher in the sky, and the golden hour is more golden. But you also get dramatic skies, fast-moving clouds, and the particular quality of light after a spring shower that makes everything look slightly luminous.

Prompt: Photograph something in the process of changing. A bud that is part-open. A tree that has blossoms on some branches and bare wood on others. A path that is half-mud, half-dry. Look for the transition rather than the finished thing. Capture the in-between.

For inspiration on seasonal nature photography, National Geographic’s photography tutorials are always worth browsing. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, run by the Natural History Museum, has a vast archive of winning images that is genuinely awe-inspiring to browse.

Short Story: Something Returns

March is a month full of returns. Migrating birds are coming back. Plants returning after winter dormancy. Longer evenings returning after months of dark. There is a strong narrative quality to all of this. Something was absent. Now it is back. That gap and the return are the shape of a story.

There’s also something worth considering about March’s wildness. It is unpredictable and a bit unruly. The weather changes fast. Plans get disrupted. Things that seemed finished turn out not to be. All of that is good material.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 700 words about a return. It could be a person coming back to somewhere they left. An animal returning to a place. Even an object reappearing. Try setting it specifically in early spring, and let the season affect how the return feels. Is the place the character returns to the same as they remember? What has changed?

For short story inspiration and craft advice, The Short Story Project has a huge free library of short fiction from around the world. Lit Hub regularly publishes essays and short stories that engage beautifully with place and season.

Drawing: Blossom, Buds, and the Structure of Spring

March is one of the most rewarding months of the year for botanical drawing. The buds opening into leaves and flowers show you the internal structure of plants in a way that you rarely see at other times of the year. A half-open bud is more interesting to draw than a fully open flower, in many ways, because the way the petals are folded and packed inside is extraordinary.

Cherry blossom is an obvious subject and a very satisfying one to draw. But so is something simpler and less celebrated. A blackthorn spray. A daffodil at various stages of opening. The unfurling fronds of a fern, which are called croziers or fiddleheads, have a beautiful spiral form.

Prompt: Pick up a single spring flower or a budding branch and draw it three times: once as a small, quick sketch, taking no more than five minutes, once as a medium drawing, taking around fifteen minutes, and once as a slow, close study, taking as long as you need. Notice what you see differently each time you slow down.

For botanical illustration guidance, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew runs illustration workshops in person and online. In the US, the American Society of Botanical Artists has resources, galleries, and workshops at various skill levels.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Forced Rhubarb is Almost Over, Wild Garlic is Beginning

March is a transitional month in the kitchen, too. The forced rhubarb from February is coming to the end of its season. Outdoor rhubarb is beginning to grow, but it isn’t ready yet. It’s a brief gap between the two that is worth knowing about.

But something more interesting is arriving. Wild garlic, also called ramsons, starts appearing in damp woodland areas in March. The leaves come first, long and broad and intensely green, and they smell unmistakably of garlic when you crush them. They are completely edible and completely free if you can find them growing locally. Before you forage for anything, it’s worth knowing what you’re looking for. The Woodland Trust’s wild garlic guide is very clear about identification, including how to tell it from the toxic lily of the valley.

In the US, a close relative called ramps is beginning to emerge in woodland areas across the Appalachians and the Midwest. Ramps have a devoted following and a short wild season. The Forager’s Harvest website by chef and forager Alan Bergo is one of the best resources for wild food in North America.

Recipe prompt: Make a wild garlic or ramp pesto. Simply blend the leaves with olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts or walnuts, and a little lemon. Use it on pasta, spread it on bread, or stir it into a simple soup. The flavour is softer and greener than regular garlic. It tastes extraordinarily like March.

If you can’t access wild garlic or ramps, make something that uses the season’s first outdoor greens instead. Spinach and nettles are both coming through now. River Cottage has excellent recipes built around seasonal foraged and garden produce.

One Last Thing

March rewards the people who are paying attention. The changes are fast now, and if you blink, you can miss them. One week, the trees are bare. Next, they have a green haze around them that is almost imperceptible up close but obvious from a distance.

I’ve started taking a photo from the same spot every week throughout the year. March is when that suddenly becomes really interesting. The differences between weeks become visible in a way that they weren’t in January and February.

Try the dawn chorus prompt if you do nothing else this month. It’s one of those experiences that is genuinely hard to describe and genuinely worth having.

I’ll be back in April, when spring is in full bloom, and there’s a whole new set of things to notice.

Previously: February. Next month: April and the full arrival of spring.