Spring promises

Bringing a beautiful, immersive installation to life for the Royal College of Music and RBG Kew.

Written in the dead of winter, it was hard to imagine how explosive and rejuvenated the spring landscape would become. Yet the composers’ transcendent pieces carried me into imagined candyfloss boughs and birdsong.

As I travelled down to experience the installation, I found myself reading Simon Armitage’s beautiful new anthology, Blossomise, commissioned by the National Trust, set to music by his folk band LYR, and illustrated by Angela Harding. There’s something heartening about these overlapping commissions across the third sector each nudging us to notice, and properly celebrate, this annual marvel. When life is so busy it would be easy to let it pass us by.

I’ve been navigating some difficult personal ground this season. In February, I suffered a serious dog attack to my face, resulting in five days in hospital and multiple plastic surgeries. It’s left me looking at spring through a slightly altered lens. I’m mindful of how impossible it once felt to picture blossom in full bloom; when the trees were stripped back, and central heating strained against the cold spells. And yet here it is again: fleeting, luminous, unapologetically alive.

If the spring boughs and these unfolding compositions remind me of anything, it’s this: that those glad-to-be-alive breathtakingly beautiful moments will always return, often astonishing us; and that all things, even the hardest of them, will pass.

You can exploe some of Jamie Smit’s work on BBC Sounds