May Prompts: How to Find Spring Creativity Prompts for May

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May is the month I find hardest to write about. Not because nothing is happening. The opposite. So much is happening that it’s difficult to know where to start.

By May, the trees are in full leaf. The hedgerows are dense and complicated. The verges are tall with cow parsley and buttercups and half a dozen other things I’m only just learning to name. The dawn chorus is at its peak. The evenings are long. Everything smells alive.

If April was the arrival, May is the full presence of spring. It’s the month that the whole year has been building towards, in some ways. And yet it’s easy to take it for granted because it’s everywhere, generous, and doesn’t require you to look hard to find it.

This is the fifth post in a year-long series about paying closer attention to the changing seasons. We’ve come from January’s bare stillness through February’s first small signs, March’s acceleration, and April’s rush of blossom and new leaves. May is the payoff. The trick now is not to let it wash over you.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

May contains the last of spring and the very beginning of summer. The two overlap here in a way that can be confusing. Meteorological summer begins on the 1st of June in many countries. But ecologically, May is where summer starts to make itself felt, particularly in the second half of the month.

The hawthorn is probably May’s most iconic plant in the UK and much of Europe. It flowers in May, which is why it’s also called the May tree. The frothy white blossom covers hedgerows across the countryside and has a heavy, complex scent that some people love, and others find overwhelming. It’s worth noting that hawthorn blossom contains trimethylamine, which is also produced in the early stages of decomposition, partly explaining its unusual smell. That’s not a criticism. It’s just an interesting fact about something thatis both beautiful and a little strange.

In the US, May varies widely by region. In the Deep South, summer is well underway. For the upper Midwest and New England, spring is still arriving. In the Pacific Northwest, May brings the most reliable good weather of the year for many areas. The National Phenology Network’s current conditions map shows what’s happening seasonally across the country in near real time.

Swifts arrive in the UK in early May, usually around the same time as the hawthorn flowers. Their arrival is one of the most anticipated wildlife events of the year for many people. They appear suddenly in the sky, screaming in groups, and the sound is unmistakably, gloriously summer. In North America, chimney swifts return to eastern states around the same time.

Butterflies are increasingly visible. In the UK, the orange tip, the holly blue, and the first of the painted ladies are flying. Bees are everywhere. In gardens and allotments, things are growing fast now, and the pollinators are busy.

Nature Journalling: Learning to Name Things

May is a good month to push your nature journaling practice a little further. There is so much to see that it makes sense to start being more specific. To move from noticing that things are there to actually learning what they are.

I want to be clear that you absolutely do not need to know the names of things to enjoy them or to notice them well. Some of the best nature writing is written by people who describe what they see without naming it. But knowing names can deepen your attention. Once you know what cow parsley is, you start noticing it everywhere. You notice when it flowers. You notice what insects visit it and notice when it starts to go over in June.

Prompt: Go for a slow walk this month with the specific intention of finding five plants you can’t name. Photograph them and then use the PlantNet app or iNaturalist to identify them when you get home. Write a short paragraph about each one. Where was it growing? What did it look like, smell like? What insects were on it? Then write down the name and one interesting fact about it.

For wildflower identification in the UK, the Wildflower Society is a wonderful organisation with resources for all levels. In the US, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Centre at the University of Texas has an excellent native plant database.

Poetry: The May Lyric

May has probably generated more lyric poetry than any other month. There is something about the abundance and the sensory overload of May that makes people want to write about it. It’s almost a cliché at this point. The spring poem. The May morning poem.

The challenge, if you’re writing poetry in May, is to resist the cliché. To not write the poem that everyone has already written. To find something specific and true rather than something general and pretty.

One way to do this is to focus on something unglamorous. The cow parsley is going slightly brown at the edges. The bluebells are already fading. The way the hawthorn smells is almost too much on a warm, still evening. May is not only beautiful. It’s also a bit excessive. It’s almost showing off. That tension is interesting to write about.

The American poet Louise Glück writes about spring with an ambivalence that is very different from the traditional celebratory spring lyric. Her collection, The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is full of flowers speaking in their own voices, and the effect is strange and moving and worth reading.

In the Japanese tradition, May contains the beginning of the rainy season in some regions, and there is a whole tradition of rain poetry that runs counter to the celebratory spring lyric. Quiet, grey, persistent rain has its own poetic tradition.

Prompt: Write a May poem that includes something difficult or ambivalent alongside something beautiful. The nettles alongside the bluebells. The hawthorn smell is almost rotten. The way beauty is relentless and slightly exhausting if you let yourself feel it fully. Let the poem hold both things at once.

Photography: Into the Green

By May, the world has become very green and photographically, which creates a challenge. Everything is lush, and there is a lot of it, and the eye doesn’t immediately know where to settle.

One approach is to find contrast within the green. The pale lime of beech leaves against the darker green of holly. A red poppy appears at the edge of a field. A person or an animal in the middle of the landscape that gives the eye somewhere to rest.

Another approach is to go very close. Get right into a single flower or leaf and fill the frame. In a world that is suddenly very full, the very close detail can be a relief. The inside of a bluebell. The tiny hairs on a nettle stem. The eye of a daisy.

The long evenings of May mean that golden hour now happens at a genuinely civilised time. Sunset is around 8.30 or 9 pm in much of northern Europe and the northern US by the end of May. This means you can get extraordinary evening light without having to stay up too late or rearrange your whole day.

Prompt: Go out in the hour before sunset on one evening this month. Photograph only things that are lit from the side or from behind by the low evening sun. Look for translucent things especially. A leaf with the sun behind it. A cow parsley head glowing against a dark background. Petals with the light coming through them. Side and back lighting transform ordinary things into something almost otherworldly.

For compositional ideas, the photographer David Ward’s work on landscape and intimate landscape photography is beautiful and instructive. His approach to finding meaning in close natural detail is well worth exploring.

Short Story: The Long Evening

May evenings have a specific quality. They go on and on. The light stays long after you expect it to be dark. There is a feeling of suspension, of time slowing down, that is particular to this time of year.

This quality of the long evening is rich territory for fiction. Things that happen in the extended May twilight have a slightly unreal, slightly heightened quality. Conversations that go somewhere unexpected. Decisions made in the long, slow dusk. The sense that normal rules are slightly suspended.

There is also a strong tradition of May as a time of folk magic and transformation. Beltane, the Celtic festival of the 1st of May, was associated with fire, fertility, and the thinning of boundaries between worlds. The greenwood has a long history in English literature as a place where ordinary rules don’t apply. Shakespeare used it extensively. You don’t have to be writing fantasy to draw on that sense of May as a slightly liminal, slightly enchanted time.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 800 words set entirely during a May evening, between about 7 pm and full dark. Something shifts during the course of that evening, either between two characters or within a single character’s understanding of something. Let the long, slow light and the smell of hawthorn and cut grass be part of the atmosphere rather than just a backdrop.

For short fiction that handles landscape and season with real skill, the work of Robert Macfarlane, though he writes non-fiction, is worth reading for how he thinks about place. His book The Wild Places has an extraordinary chapter in May.

Drawing: Cow Parsley and Complex Things

May presents a new drawing challenge. In January, you were drawing simple bare twigs. In April, you were drawing individual flowers. May, the plants are complex and multiple, and you have to make choices about how much to include.

Cow parsley, also called Queen Anne’s Lace in North America, is one of May’s most characteristic and beautiful plants. It’s also notoriously difficult to draw because the flower heads are made up of hundreds of tiny individual flowers arranged in a flat-topped cluster called an umbel. The temptation is either to draw every tiny flower, which takes forever, or to give up and do a vague scribble, which looks unsatisfying.

The trick, I think, is to choose one part of the plant and draw it with real attention, while suggesting the rest more loosely. Draw three or four individual florets in real detail at the centre of a flower head. Then use lighter, sketchier marks for the surrounding ones. Your eye and brain will fill in the rest.

Prompt: Find a piece of cow parsley or another umbellifer such as hogweed or sweet cicely and draw just one flower head. Spend the first five minutes looking at the structure before you make any marks. Notice how the stems radiate outward from a central point like spokes on a wheel. The tiny individual flowers. Notice how the outer flowers are often larger than the inner ones. Then draw what you’ve actually seen rather than what you think it looks like.

The botanical illustrator Margaret Mee spent her career drawing complex tropical plants, and her approach to botanical complexity is inspiring and instructive, even if her subject matter is very different from that of a British hedgerow.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Elderflower, Asparagus Still, and the First Soft Fruits

May brings one of the most exciting seasonal ingredients of the entire year. Elderflower. The elder tree flowers in late May, and the blossom has a delicate, sweet, almost tropical scent that makes one of the best cordials and syrups in the world. It also makes excellent fritters when dipped in a light batter and fried, which sounds strange and is absolutely delicious.

Elderflower season is short. Two to three weeks at most, depending on the weather. When it’s there, it’s worth making something with it because you can’t buy it in a shop. You can only find it. Look for elder trees in hedgerows and woodland edges. The flowers are the flat-topped clusters of tiny cream-white flowers that appear in late May. Be sure you’re identifying it correctly. The Woodland Trust’s elder identification guide is clear and helpful.

Asparagus is still in season and is worth eating as much as possible before it finishes in June. Strawberries begin to ripen at the end of May in warmer areas. In the US, depending on your region, you may also be seeing the first soft fruits and early-summer vegetables.

Recipe prompt: Make elderflower cordial if you can find the blossom. The basic method involves steeping the flower heads in a hot sugar syrup with lemon zest and citric acid for twenty-four hours. River Cottage has a reliable recipe. Dilute it with cold sparkling water on the first warm evening of May, and it will taste like the season itself.

If you can’t find elderflower, make something with the first strawberries you can find. A simple strawberry and cream, eaten outside in the long evening light, is one of May’s genuine pleasures.

One Last Thing

I’ve been thinking about what it means to pay this kind of attention to a month. Not to rush through it. Not to be waiting for the next thing. Just to be properly present in May while it’s happening.

There’s a concept in mindfulness practice of beginner’s mind. Approaching something familiar as if you’re seeing it for the first time. May rewards a beginner’s mind more than almost any other month because it is so full, so fast-moving, and so easy to take for granted.

Look at the cow parsley. Smell the hawthorn. Sit outside in the long evening. These things are free, here right now, and won’t be here the same way next week.

I’ll be back in June, when summer arrives properly and the pace shifts again.

Previously: April. Next month: June and the long days of early summer.