My name is Fiona, and I press flowers for a living. My little studio occupies the sunniest corner of a stone cottage in the Cotswolds, and every May, the world outside my window seems to conspire with my work — hawthorn blossom against a washed blue sky, meadow buttercups catching the morning light, hedgerows suddenly alive with colour after months of grey.

I’ve been pressing and preserving wildflowers for over a decade now: framing them into delicate botanical prints, layering them into greeting cards, or weaving them into pieces of art that try to hold that fleeting moment when spring is at its most generous. But the thing I find myself returning to, year after year, is this: spring doesn’t only happen outside. It happens inside us, too — if we give it the chance.

The Permission of a New Season

There is something about May that feels like permission. Not the shy, hesitant permission of March, when you’re not quite sure if warmth will last. May is bold. It says: go ahead. Plant the seeds you’ve been holding. Open the window. Try the thing you’ve been putting off since winter.

I think of spring as the season of creative audacity. Every year, I take on a project I’m slightly afraid of — something I don’t quite know how to do yet. One year it was pressing ferns the size of my arm. Another, dyeing paper with elderflower and letting the flowers mark it however they liked. This May, I’m experimenting with pressing transparent petals onto handmade glass. I have no idea if it will work. That’s rather the point.

Small Things Worth Celebrating

If you’re looking for a way to invite a little of that spring spirit into your own life, I’d encourage you to begin with something small. Spring’s secret is that it doesn’t start all at once — it accumulates. A single crocus. Then ten. Then a meadow.

- Collect something from outside — a handful of grass, a seed pod, a pebble — and put it on your desk where you can see it

- Give yourself a project with a loose brief: "make something using only things I find this week"

- Spend one morning working near a window with no music, no podcast — just the sound of the season

None of these are grand gestures. But they are intentions, and intention is where everything begins.

Gifts That Grow

May is also a lovely time to think about the people we love, not because of any particular occasion, but simply because the warmth of the season makes us generous. A pressed flower card, handwritten. A small jar of homemade elderflower cordial tied with a ribbon. A potted herb from the market, carried over on your bicycle.

The most meaningful gifts are often the ones that carry evidence of the season they came from — a little dirt, a faint fragrance, a colour that will slowly fade and leave behind only the memory of the moment. They are not preserved so much as shared.

What My Flowers Taught Me

Pressing a flower is, in its way, a quiet act of trust. You place it carefully between the pages, apply a little weight, and wait. You can’t hurry it. You can’t peek too soon. And when you finally open the pages weeks later, what you find is not quite what you put in — the colour has shifted, the edges have curled gently, and something altogether new and lovely has emerged from the waiting.

I find that creative seasons work in much the same way. The ideas we plant in May often bloom differently than we imagined — and that difference, that surprise, is where the real magic lives.

With warmth and wildflowers,

Fiona