Spring in the City is a Prison Riot

Who needs theatre and art galleries when it's spring in the city? The streets are bursting with drama. Colour is all around is, if we can take the time to stop and look. Spring is rightly famous for its beauty, but there's a strange, uncanny danger under the surface that has always left us a bit unsettled...

Where were these people all prison long? All of a sudden, the streets are full of them. It’s not even 20 degrees yet but the tops are already off, the muscles are oiled, the flesh is shining, the lattes are flowing. All of London is blooming with the summer people and it’s like a new world.

Spring is beautiful. Everyone knows that, it’s accepted fact. But spring in the city is a prison riot. It’s just unnatural. It doesn’t belong here. Cherry blossoms poke hard hands through the bars. Plane trees spit hairy seeds in your eye. The magnolia blooms curl their seductive lips. All around, an obscene opulence is unfolding in slow motion excess. A beautiful hallucination suppressed by concrete and glass and steel

Spring is an asphyxiation. We talk about spring as renewal, as softness, as joy. But look closer. Spring isn’t gentle. It’s a riot, an explosion, a fever dream. It’s excess in all directions, the buds bursting, the sap oozing, flowers tearing themselves apart at the seams to express the form that waited so long under the winter soil. The dazzling jungle is pressing in, vines curling, petals unfurling with a force of abrupt violence sponsored by a bit of weak northern sunshine.

Werner Herzog, filming in the Amazon, once raged against the jungle, calling it a place of “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival.” This is spring, too. Life returning, but not as a whisper. Rather, it comes as a scream. Nature doesn’t politely tap on the door and ask if we’re ready. It forces its way in, claws and roots and blossoms in our faces, choking the air with pollen, swarming with insects, dripping, swelling, overripe.

And in the city, this wildness is contained, shoved into parks, creeping up from pavement cracks, compressed into a spectacle we might admire on a lunch break in some scrubby little park. Spring in London is a performance, nature in a cage, a dream made manageable. But you can feel the strangeness of it. The way it shouldn’t be here. The way it presses against its boundaries, trying to break out.

The trees don’t know they’re in London, of course. They don’t know they were planted between office buildings and traffic lights. They wake up in spring like they’ve woken up for millennia, stretching, blooming, spilling their riot of colour into streets that weren’t built for them. And for a few weeks, the city has to make space for something older, wilder, and completely uninterested in our schedules.

The certainty of their way of life might make us question our own, if we dared. A flower never needs to wonder what it is doing. A flower doesn’t question its purpose. A flower flowers. Its purpose is in its name. Humans human whether they like it or not, but how often are we infected by the fear that we are doing the wrong thing. That we should be somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. Which rose wanted to be a hyacinth, which hyacinth a fuchsia, which fuchsia a potted basil? The basil never goes pink. It does what it’s always done. The magnolia won’t adopt a new flavour so that you can tear it up and drop it on top of your pasta. It snatches your attention and dies in your arms like the most tragic hero.

Where cherry blossoms scatter delicately, magnolia flowers sit heavy and swollen, thick as flesh. Their petals are waxy, stubborn. They fall in slow motion, landing like discarded silk in the streets, decomposing in heaps of grotesque luxury. They smell sweet, too sweet, as though nature imprinted its thumb too hard in them.

Magnolias are ancient, prehistoric beings. They existed before bees, their first pollinators lumbering beetles, crawling over them in that ancient, damp jungle. And yet here they are, in London, standing outside Victorian terraces and government buildings, their monstrous blooms pinned in place like taxidermy. They belong to a different world, a world of heavy air and tangled undergrowth, and yet we’ve made them into decoration. Caged them in city streets.

Maybe that’s why they’ve always unsettled us. They feel like an artefact from another time, a relic, an alien creature that should have died out but hasn’t. There’s a stubbornness to them, a refusal to be erased. Unlike the cherry blossom, which explodes and vanishes, magnolias persist. They cling on, thick and shameless, long after their welcome.

There is a selfishness to spring, a kind of ferocity in its display. This is not nature politely returning but insisting on itself, demanding attention, staking its claim. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cherry blossom. It is not a gentle symbol. It is a peacock’s tail, an actor’s bow, an eruption of beauty that refuses to be ignored.

Pablo Neruda wrote, “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” And what does spring do? It does not simply make the trees bloom but forces them to. It pushes beauty to the edge of destruction, a performance so intense it cannot last. Neruda’s love is not a quiet devotion; it is a hunger, an all-consuming demand. His love wants to burst into being, to overtake, to turn something ordinary into a spectacle.

Maybe that’s why cherry blossoms have always carried a thread of melancholy within them. In Japan, where hanami, the viewing of blossoms, is an annual ritual, the beauty of the sakura is inseparable from its fleeting glory. The petals fall almost as soon as they appear. The performance is brief, the applause quickly fading. And yet, this transience is what makes it precious.

Like all great art, the spring stops us in our tracks. We stare. We let ourselves be interrupted.

Because that’s what spring. It pulls us out of our heads, forces us to look, to notice, to wake up. It’s easy to ignore the city most of the year, to rush through it without seeing. But in spring, the plants with whom we are so unconsciously symbiotic make themselves known by their drama. They refuse to be background noise.

Cherry blossoms remind us of transience. Beauty flares up and vanishes before we’ve had time to hold onto it. Magnolias remind us of endurance, of how something ancient and so indifferent can thrive in a world it was never meant for. And spring itself reminds us that life, real life, is urgent and chaotic and now.

We either notice it, or we don’t. But nature refuses to wait.

31.03.25