Daffs have sprung into bloom

Tear up the calendars, rip up the textbooks, tell the poets that they have got it wrong ... seriously wrong.

Spring is here already - or so the flowers seem to think. It should not be, and everything we have ever been taught tells us that we should have several weeks of winter left to go.

But try telling that to these Chelsea daffodils, which, judging by our picture, seem to be under the impression that it is early March, not mid-January.

"It is very unusual to find daffodils blooming in the middle of January," said a spokesman for Kew Gardens. "Usually you would expect to find them towards the end of February or in early March."

These are not the first daffodils to show their faces this year - Cornwall got its first ones a couple of weeks ago. But Cornwall, unlike London, has the advantage of being directly warmed by the Gulf stream, and these are undoubtedly among the first daffs to bloom here in London.

Richard Wilford, a gardens manager at Kew, reckoned the daffodils had flowered because they had the added protection of being in a London square. "They are taking advantage of this mild weather to come out early," he said. But he warned that it was still too early to get complacent. "We had a mild spell in February last year," he said. "But we also had snow."

The Met Office explained it all away in prosaic terms: "We've had a mild winter so far following on the heels of a long warm and dry period from August until October," said a spokesman. "The combination of these two things is causing a lot of plants to think it is already spring and time to start coming out. Crocuses and stuff are already coming through.

"It is about two or three degrees Celsius above normal at the moment. In London the maximum temperature is usually about 6C but, over the last few weeks, it has been around 8 or 9C."

That is all very well but such climatic disruptions threaten to upset everything we have been taught to believe about seasons and the natural order.

Take Keats, for instance: how did the poem start?

"St Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass

And silent was the flock in woolly fold."

Hard to believe, really, that St Agnes' Eve is next Tuesday.