Compost | March

Leaning into the dualities of early spring: blossoms and birds, Pisces season, Welsh mythology, the Moon and the mystery

Mar 16, 2025

I’ve always loved March for the potential of it. Somewhere in late February or early March there’s a shift - of the light, the air, the energy - and suddenly the world is tilting towards being green and growing. Maybe it’s the sap rising, the earth waking up. Maybe it’s waking up in daylight rather than darkness. Whatever the reason, spring is indisputably almost here and I can feel myself exhale after the long winter.

I love the colours of March: whites, pinks, purples, greens, yellows. Blackthorn blossom, hazel catkins, crocuses, the last of the snowdrops, the first of the daffodils. The grass is starting to grow again after lying dormant over the winter, and there’s a haze of green leaf buds on the birch trees. March is the anticipation of spring, the almost-but-not-quite moment before we plunge into the growing season proper.

March is also my mum’s birthday (she would have been 75 this year), International Women’s Day (about which I have slightly ambivalent feelings), and St David’s Day (the patron saint of Wales - daffodils again) so I’ve been thinking a lot about motherhood, womanhood, and home. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I like to think my way around a topic, taking what can at first seem like detours heading in the opposite direction, or trying to hack my way through a thick undergrowth of ideas towards it. Eventually - maybe after several weeks or even months - I’ll find my way to a conclusion, like emerging from dark woodland into the sunshine. I’m still deep amongst the trees on my current topic-journey. Over the last month or so, my path through the woods has been the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.

Flower Women and Bird Men

The Mabinogion is a collection of eleven early Welsh prose stories, written down in the twelfth century based on even earlier oral storytelling traditions. The Four Branches of the Mabinogi are the heart of the Mabinogion, a series of interrelated stories with recurring characters and themes. They are mythology or romances or fairy tales or quasi-historical accounts of early medieval Welsh society and politics, depending on how you read them or what you’re interested in.

The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi is made up of a sequence of stories centred around Math fab Mathonwy (Math son of Mathonwy). The story I’m particularly interested in is about a boy without a name, a woman made of flowers, a trickster magician, and a method of death even more unlikely than Achilles. It’s the story that shapes the plot of The Owl Service by Alan Garner: the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Blodewedd and Gronw Pebr. And Gwydion, the magician, who is arguably the main character - as he seems to be the only character in the story with any agency.

To (briefly) summarise: Gwydion tricks his sister Arianrhod into revealing that she is not a virgin, and she gives birth to two children. The eldest, Dylan ail Don (Dylan the son of the Wave), is baptised and “took on the sea’s nature and swam as well as the best fish in the sea”1; essentially, he becomes a god of the sea. The youngest, “a small something”, is scooped up by Gwydion, who hides it in a chest in his bedroom and later discovers it to be a boy, who he decides to raise. When the boy is four years old, Gwydion takes him to visit his mother for the first time and Arianrhod, who rejects the boy as a symbol of her shame and places a tynged on him (a destiny, a fate, equivalent to an Irish geas) that he will never have a name. Gwydion later tricks her into naming the boy Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Bright Skilful Hand).

Arianrhod goes on to place two more tynghedau on Lleu, that he will never be given weapons except by her and that he will never have a human wife. Gwydion tricks her again: Lleu receives his sword and shield from his mother, and Gwydion fashions him a wife made of flowers, transformed by magic into a woman.

Then they took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen. And they baptised her in the way that they did at that time, and named her Blodeuedd.2

Lleu and Blodeuwedd (Flower Face) are married. One day, when Lleu is away from home, Blodeuwedd meets another man, Gronw Pebr, and they fall instantly and deeply in love. In feminist retellings of this story, this is the moment when Blodeuwedd claims her own agency, rejecting the man she was created for and given to, and taking another of her own choosing. Blodeuwedd and Gronw decide that they must kill Lleu so that they can be together, but Lleu has another tynged on him: he cannot die “during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding or walking, not clothed and not naked, nor by any weapon lawfully made”3.

Blodeuwedd convinces Lleu to tell her the unlikely set of circumstances in which he could be killed: at dusk, while stepping out of a river onto a riverbank, wrapped in a net, sheltered by a thatched roof, with one foot on the back of a billy-goat and the other on the edge of an iron cauldron, with a spear forged over a year of Sundays when the maker should have been at church. She and Gronw recreate these circumstances and she asks Lleu to demonstrate how he would need to stand in order to be killed. Lleu, trusting, does so and Gronw throws a spear which strikes him through the heart.

Lleu transforms into an eagle and flies away. He is later rescued by Gwydion, who nurses him back into human form. Lleu tells the story of how he was “killed” and he and Gwydion take their revenge on the lovers. Blodeuwedd is transformed into an owl as a punishment, and Gronw agrees to let Lleu throw a spear at him as he stands on the same riverbank where Lleu was struck. Lleu allows Gronw to stand behind a large stone, but despite this makeshift shield, Lleu’s spear pierces straight through the stone and Gronw is killed.

I love this story in so many ways. The transformation from flowers to person, from person to bird4. The tynghedau and Gwydion’s ingenuity in finding a way around them. The frankly impossible set of circumstances required for Lleu to be killed, and the way he walks into his death like a character in a horror film, choosing to do the one thing you know he absolutely should not do.

There’s also a lot going on in terms of male-female relationships and social roles. Gwydion forces his sister Arianrhod to give birth (Dylan and Lleu’s unexpected appearance can be read as a premature birth). He repeatedly calls her wicked for her refusal to name or arm her unacknowledged and unwanted son, and tricks her into doing both. Gwydion creates Blodeuwedd and gives her to Lleu essentially as a gift, an object: a beautiful wife as the final marker of his manhood. Blodeuwedd appears to succeed in escaping from the marriage forced upon her through her own ingenuity and trickery. Gwydion ultimately punishes Blodeuwedd for her Lady Macbeth-like role in plotting his nephew and foster son’s death.

And yet, I harbour a soft spot for Lleu. In most retellings of the story, he lacks agency just as much as Blodeuwedd does. Things happen to him, rather than him actively seeking them. He does not ask for a name or weapons or a wife, but Gwydion gives them to him. He is Gwydion’s creation just as much as Blodeuwedd is. In Matthew Francis’s poetic retelling, Gwydion acknowledges this, saying that: “She was the wife I had made for the man I had grown” and “They were both my fault, these crude experiments in human”5. Both Lleu and Blodeuwedd are created for, and harmed by, the patriarchal society in which they live.

Bird of the Month: Curlew

Numenius arquata, Y Gylfinir

I was planning to write about tits this month - blue tits and great tits that is - because they are the birds I remember best from my childhood, because March is my mum’s birthday month so I’m thinking a lot about my childhood, and because they have yellow breasts and March is a month of yellows (daffodils, crocuses, catkins, primroses, sunshine). But the curlews are back in the fields next to the old railway track, wheeling and calling above me on my morning runs, and I have remembered again how much I love them.

Before we moved here, to this village on the edge of the moors north of Weardale, I always thought of curlews as coastal birds. One wader among many, picking their way along the mudflats at the month of the river at low tide. I couldn’t understand what they were doing here, 40 minutes drive from the sea. I’ve since learned that curlews spend the winter on the coast, where it’s milder, returning to the upland moorland and meadows each spring to lay eggs and raise their young. The birds that I’m seeing now probably spent the winter in Ireland or France. The birds that I saw on the coast during childhood winters might have flown south from Scandinavia.

On a spring day almost a year after Frytha came to the Dale, they were lying on their stomachs on the shoulder of Beacon Fell, high above Butharsmere. The year was still young, and the little wind blew chill through the long heather, smelling wonderfully of bog and thin sunshine, and a little of the snow that still dappled the north-eastern crests of the high fells; and all around them the curlews were crying, filling all the world with their wild bubbling music.6

Every spring the curlews return, and every spring they surprise me again. A piece of everyday magic, like seeing a hare cross my path. They have become one of the signs I look for in the natural world to help locate myself in the cycle of seasons. Early March: the daffodils are almost open, the snowdrops are going over, the first of the blackthorn blossom is out on the trees along the road to the supermarket, the curlews are back in the fields west of the village.

I’m enjoying expanding my Welsh vocabulary by learning the Welsh name of each bird I write about in these monthly compost post. The curlew has over ten different names in Welsh! The most common seems to be y gylfinir, the long-bill (gylfin means bill and hir means long). Some of my other favourites are chwibanogl y mynydd (the mountain whistler), cwrlig (probably a welshified version of curlew), and cwn Ebrill (April’s dogs). The most plausible explanation I’ve found for that last name is that the curlew’s bubbling cry, heard in the darkness of a night in early spring, sounds like barking dogs, like hunting hounds when they pick up the scent. Last week my husband and son, returning from football training after dark, heard a curlew flying over our street and reported that it sounded like a dog in the sky.

This makes me think of cwn Annwn (the hounds of Annwn), otherwise known as hellhounds, yell hounds, Gabriel hounds, Herne and the Wild Hunt. They are the dog guardians of the otherworld, said to run barking through the skies between Christmas and Twelfth Night. The cwn Annwn are associated with migrating geese, again because the geese’s honking cries are said to sound like dogs barking. I like the idea of curlews, cwn Ebrill, as a springtime version of these ghostly sky-dogs.

Shadows and Mystery: The Moon

I’ve decided to choose a tarot card to write about this month, rather than draw some cards at random for a tarot reading. There’s one card in particular that has kept nudging against my mind while I’ve been writing this post: the Moon.

The Moon represents mystery and magic, the unconscious and the unknown. It’s a card associated with feminine energy, with cycles and change. It reminds you that things are not always what they seem: the world looks different in the darkness, under the light of a full moon. Different rules might apply. It’s a card for dreaming and dream logic, for exploring your shadow self. For allowing yourself to exist in the uncertainty, rather than trying to grasp for answers and solid ground.

Many Moons from the Labyrinth Tarot / Rider Waite / Wild Unknown / Tarot for All Ages decks

It feels like a good card to spend some time with this month, as we stand on the cusp of true spring and the weather switches rapidly between wintery showers and warm sunshine. It’s a good card to pick in Pisces season: the two fish swimming in opposite directions represent to me the balance between light and dark, between winter and spring. You can’t have one without the other. It’s a good card to pick for IWD, for as women we are tied to the moon and its cycles, to the ebb and the flow of the tides. It’s good card to pick for the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, where men transform from human to animal and back again, or flowers become woman become owl. Everything is uncertain, the boundaries between different forms are perhaps not as solid as we think.

Two things can be true at the same time: for me, Pisces season means Mum’s birthday so the Moon card also makes me think of the love and sorrow I feel for her in her absence. The strangeness of realising after her death that I could feel joy and grief simultaneously, that one could not eclipse the other. A strangeness that is now familiar and comfortable. I can’t remember how it was to live without a knot of grief always curled within me. These days I need the darkness as well as the light. I crave the mystery: the everyday things that just might be imbued with deep significance and hidden meanings. Two geese flying overhead as I walk my son to school, finding a stone with a hole in it on the beach, a tawny owl calling in the trees behind my house on the night before Mum’s birthday.

Writing Aloud

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