Tristan Gooley

It's telling us it's a perennial plant.

So the earliest flowers have typically got bulbs underground or something like that, which allows them to go early.

So it's a very simple clue in that sense.

The first flowers you see each year, you will see in the same place the following year.

They are perennial plants.

It just doesn't work.

If you're going very early, you have to have something in the battery from the year before.

Annual plants have to wait until the sun is higher in the sky.

The way I put it is punctual means perennial.

If something's very early, you'll see it in exactly the same place the following year.

Are there other examples of that besides flowers?

Yeah.

So stinging nettles, there's a good general rule in nature that however distant somebody feels from nature, if a plant causes pain, we tend to know its name.

So stinging nettles, most of us kind of still have some relationship with.

Now for decades, I've had a fun relationship with stinging nettles because they form a good compass.

They'll lean towards the light.

So we find the sort of leaning towards the south where most of the light comes from.

But they're also making a map because stinging nettles will only grow in places where there's a nutrient spike in the soil.

And human beings change the soil.

The way we live, the way we work, the way we farm, the way we die changes the soil