Welcome to as the season turns, a podcast following each month of the year, as the

hedgerows change, the full moons come and go, and nature takes its course in the

garden. I'm Leila Lander, as a nature writer and author of The Almanac, a seasonal guide. This

podcast is brought to you by Fern, makers of small batch organic natural perfume, who blend,

barrel age and bottle four fragrances a year, released at the equinoxes and solstices.

We hope that this brief guide to what to look for in the month ahead will awaken you to the rhythms of the year and help you, in the words of the poet Ray Carver, settle deeper into the seasons.

Hello, it's February.

It's short, it's dark, and right now it's really, really cold.

Some months are dramatically different in atmosphere to the month preceding them.

Think of the difference between sparkly, gluttonous December and sparse, austere January,

or between languid laid-back August and busy productive September.

I would say that the differences between January and February are subtler, to say the least. Not a great deal has changed, but some things have. For me,

the key to February is the old Gaelic celebration of Imelk, which falls on the first of the month.

Imelk has been adopted by New Pagans as one of the spokes in their wheel of the year,

their markers of the changing seasons, and it falls roughly halfway between the shortest day,

the winter solstice, and the spring equinoxx when day and night are of equal length.

It's thought that the name Imulk may come from You's milk.

Euse a lambing and the cycle of life is beginning again in the countryside all around us.

But I first came across Imilk when somebody said to me at the beginning of February that they

were feeling immolky, which is not a real word, by the way.

She went on to explain that what she meant by it was that feeling that you get at this time of the year,

that sudden urge to sow seeds and to get going on the year that surges up in you around this moment.

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