What blooms in the third week of March

I have, for six years now, kept a small notebook in which I record what is in bloom along the forest edge of the Bois de Vincennes during the third week of March. The notebook is plain, about the size of a passport, and it lives in the top drawer of the bedside table from the end of March until early April every year. The rest of the time I forget about it.

The third week of March is the week the forest edge wakes up. Before that there is almost nothing flowering. After that the wave is too big to keep up with — by the first week of April there are forty new things in bloom and the catalogue becomes impossible. But the third week is small and specific and worth recording.

What blooms in roughly the same order, every year

First the wood anemones, in small white patches under the bare beech trees. Usually around the 16th or 17th, give or take three days. Then, almost simultaneously, the lesser celandines, with their small yellow stars on the damp banks of the path. The celandines like wet feet. The anemones do not. They share the same week and almost never the same square metre.

By the 20th the primroses are usually out, in the cleared patch behind the old keeper's hut. There are about thirty plants there, the same thirty every year, and I have watched them for six springs. The hazels finish flowering somewhere in the same window, their small red female flowers having been there since February but only really visible once the catkins are gone.

What changes

The dates shift, year to year, by as much as ten days. Two years ago the spring was very early and the wood anemones were out on the 7th of March. Last year the spring was late and they did not appear until the 24th. The order is roughly the same but the timing is not. The catalogue is, among other things, a small climate record kept by one person on one forest edge.

Why I keep doing it

I am not sure. It has become a habit, and the habit produces a small annual document, and the document has come to feel important even though it is of no use to anyone but me. I think it is also a way of making spring slow down. Without the catalogue, spring is a blur — one week there is no green and the next week everything is green. With the catalogue, each species has its day, and the spring has the careful structure I had not noticed.

If you walk the same path year after year, try this. A small notebook. One week of spring. The flowers in the order they appear. After a few years the catalogue starts to mean something.