The Seasons with Alan Titchmarsh

Spring (1x1)

: 09, 2010

Episode One – Spring In this brand new four part series for ITV1, everyone’s favourite gardener, Alan Titchmarsh goes back to his roots to find out how our changing seasons affect everything around us. The series reveals the profound and far-reaching impact that each season has on our wildlife and landscape, and how they shape the way we all live. In the first programme Alan leads us through the start of the natural year, spring, a time of hope and optimism is under every foot and around every corner new life is just waiting to begin. Alan’s natural enthusiasm for the subject, alongside stunning photography, brings the subject of spring to life, exploring and vividly displaying its transformative effect as it sweeps from south to north between March and May, affecting everything from scallop fishing in Dorset to stags shedding their antlers in the Scottish Highlands. The programme looks at why spring arrives when it does in Britain and why weather is so unpredictable at this time of year. Its broad scope encompasses how spring heralds a time of reawakening, highlighting the rich profusion of wildlife and plants emerging after the long winter days across our skies, hills, rivers, forests and coastline. Alan says: “Spring isn’t just about what you can see. It’s a feeling in the pit of your stomach and you can smell it too. Not that acrid sour smell of autumn, but a sweetness on the breeze that’s all its own.” Alan explains how the seasons underpin and drive patterns of behaviour that affect humans as well as occur in nature. And he looks at the way our ancestors’ seasonal rituals still influence today’s springtime celebrations. Alan describes spring as ‘nature’s dinner gong’ and he investigates the fundamental importance of insects in the food chain that jolts into life in spring. He tells the programme why so many early spring flowers are yellow as well as taking in the riot of other colours that carpet our forests as