It's bluebell season!

Hard to believe, but Stay For A Spell has been out for three weeks in the US and two in the rest of the world! I’ve even been tagged in an Instagram post about the Spanish edition, which was AWESOME.

Even harder to believe, Spell got a truly glowing review in the New York Times (I will never be over this) and was a bestseller in the UK - number six in the overall Sunday Times hardback fiction chart and number one on the independent bookstore charts. I will also never be over this. A huge and heartfelt thank you to you, readers and booksellers! I genuinely could not have done it without you.

Let’s talk about bluebells! The humble bluebell has such a mythological status in English literature that I, growing up elsewhere and knowing it only from colour comparisons and references in various classic novels, didn’t really take it seriously when I first moved here. It’s just some sort of flower, I thought to myself, one of many in a country where everyone seems obsessed with flowers. Indeed, my first real experience with bluebells was Penhaligon’s Bluebell perfume - the first expensive bottle of perfume I ever bought, and a scent I wore exclusively for nearly a decade.

It wasn’t until I moved out of Central London, into a house with a garden and a bunch of big, nearby semi-rural parks and cemeteries, that I finally learned why people are - reasonably! - really into bluebells.

They’re gorgeous.

The humble English bluebell only blooms for a couple of weeks in early spring. It is extremely delicate, and if it’s crushed during its blooming period it may not ever grow back. Bluebells prefer shaded areas, like hedgerows, and spread profusely in woodlands. If left undisturbed, they can create an absolutely immense carpet over time. If you spot a giant expanse of them growing alongside wild garlic in a wood, you might be in an “ancient woodland,” that is, a forested area that’s been left mostly undisturbed for at least four hundred years. Which is so cool.

There are also rare white bluebells, alongside the darker blue-violet ‘bluebell’ coloured-flower, and they sometimes crossbreed to produce pink bluebells; we have loads of all three in one of our local cemeteries, and spotting them, (and inevitably taking a picture), always makes me feel like I’ve just papped an A-lister.

The invasive Spanish bluebell is a lighter lilac colour and a lot hardier; some earlier resident of our home planted them in our garden and they come back every year, despite the fact that we often accidentally disinter the bulbs in the summer when we’re weeding. (We then reinter them, apparently to no ill effect.)

A few years ago we had an incredibly rainy April and bluebell season lasted for the entire month; usually they’re only at their peak for a week or two in late March/early April. If you’re lucky enough to be in the UK during bluebell season, finding a bluebell walk is well worth it; it’ll be you, a hundred influencers, and an incredible purple and green haze just a few inches off the forest floor. But don’t pick them or step on them! (And try not to get too hot under the collar when you see people on instagram picking them/stepping on them.)

I’ve got a few events lined up this summer, including a panel at Cymera on Sunday, 7 June, when Chiara Bullen and Lucy Jane Wood and I will be discussing ‘books and bakes’ at 11.45; you can livestream our panel if you can’t make it to Edinburgh in person. I’ll also be at Bradford Lit Fest in July, and there’ll be some Waterstones events too! More info once things are confirmed!

Just One More Thing: About Penhaligon’s Bluebell perfume. I found it when I bought one of their discovery sample sets, many years ago, and it was my immediate favourite - the initial burst of scent is extremely sweet and extremely floral, almost cloying; if I’m being honest. The topnotes smell a little like someone chewed up and spat out a mouthful of dried potpurri. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; perfume, I think, is at its finest when it has an element of the animalistic to it, something almost uncomfortably intimate to ground the sparkle of the topnotes. But after a few minutes, Bluebell’s scent dries down to a soft spice that sits very close to the skin; you have to really bury your nose in it to catch it, and it’s that spicy softness that I love.

It was, apparently, Princess Diana’s favourite perfume. It is also, as you might imagine from my description above, a controversial favourite. The glorious Perfumes: The A-Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tanya Sanchez, otherwise an exceedingly level-headed reference, sums up Bluebell in a single word: “repellent.”

Newsletter header image: ‘bluebells’: Photo by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash