Generosity

Every year, without fail, spring catches me off guard. Not because it’s a surprise - I’ve been waiting for it with baited breath - but because no matter how many times you’ve seen it, there’s something about the first unfurling of the blossom that still feels like a small miracle.

As a chef, spring arrives before the calendar says it should. It comes in those tentative first sightings: the teeny tiny green shoots of wild garlic along a path, and magnolias blushing open. Then, gloriously, the first spears of asparagus. For me, that’s the real announcement, not a date, but a flavour. And with it comes colour, lightness, and the sense that the kitchen has much to do.

There’s something I find myself returning to with spring, and also just generally in everything I do. This idea of a circle rather than a line. In relation to spring, we talk about ‘new beginnings’ as though winter was an ending, but look at an apple tree - the roots and trunk are the same as they were last year, and the year before that. What’s new are the buds, the blossom, the leaves - expressions of something that’s been quietly there all along. Rooted in the familiar, reaching for what’s next. I think that’s a more honest version of renewal than the clean-slate story we sometimes tell ourselves.

My connection with nature is woven into pretty much everything I do, including how I cook, what I cook, and why I cook. I have a deep, genuine adoration for what nature offers and how it does it. It constantly feels extraordinary to me, still.

But that generosity is exactly what makes me sit with a question I can’t quite shake: what do we give back? We take a ruby-red apple from a tree, a proud spear of asparagus from the soil, a glistening oyster from the ocean. And in return? Do we tend the tree, feed the soil, think about what the ocean needs from us? I don’t ask this from a place of guilt - more from a genuine curiosity, and a growing sense of responsibility.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and her writing reframes the relationship between humans and the natural world in a way that has genuinely stayed with me. She talks about reciprocity - not as an abstract ideal, but as a practice. The idea that when we receive the gifts of the earth, we incur a responsibility to give back. That ‘all flourishing is mutual.’

My own footprint is far from perfect. I take from the land, from producers, from the hard work of growers, and I’m under no illusion that I’m fully giving back in equal measure. But I think the shift starts with paying attention. Noticing. Being genuinely grateful, not in a performative way, but in a way that quietly changes how you act. Kimmerer puts it beautifully: ‘Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.’

So perhaps that’s what spring really is, for me. Not just the light, the warmth, or the produce (though all of that is genuinely wonderful). It’s the annual reminder that something has been quietly at work while we weren’t looking, and that if we’re paying attention, we might just find a way to be part of the cycle rather than just recipients of it.

My motto is to ‘always keep planting seeds’. I don’t mean this literally (although the joy of it is always worth it) but metaphorically. Share, tend, care and act. The ‘seeds’ may sprout today, tomorrow, next year, or in a decade. The very act of ‘planting’ shows reciprocity, care, and is the true embodiment of spring.