Spring

Spring is the season when Sophia’s father’s long preparation becomes visible growth—and when that growth begins to strain against The island’s natural limits. In the novel’s seasonal cycle, spring is both a return to the island and a test of what can take root there: Dutch bulbs and imported plants flourish, but the elaborate effort to sustain them leaves the native ground drying under a rainless sky.

A season prepared in absence

Spring begins before the family returns. Late in autumn, Sophia’s father plants bulbs brought from Holland, then spends the winter studying plants, shrubs, and trees. He learns that the imported varieties require particular soil and carefully timed water, protection from field mice and weather, and attention to the sea’s exposure. The plants are not simply carried into a waiting garden; their needs determine the work and equipment that must follow.

The preparations continue through the island’s seasonal withdrawal. In August, as signs of habitation are put away and autumn approaches, Sophia’s father stacks firewood for the next spring. Grandmother, meanwhile, makes provisions for anyone who might land on the island while the family is away: she leaves instructions about carrying in wood and protects the windows against birds. These practical arrangements place spring in a recurring cycle of departure and return. The island is cleared and left to the seasons, but the family’s work already anticipates coming back.

The return and the planting

When the family returns, the scale of the project is unmistakable. Two boats tow their supplies; large bales of black inland soil are rolled ashore, while plants, shrubs, trees, and hundreds of delicate sprouts are carried to the veranda. Late spring brings sleet and daily storms. The house becomes a temporary shelter for the collection: plants crowd the floor, suitcases form narrow paths, and blankets cover the windows. Even Grandmother, losing her balance, sometimes sits on the plants, most of which straighten again.

As soon as the weather allows, Sophia’s father works across The island. He rises at six, makes sandwiches for everyone, and goes out to strip turf from the bedrock, dig planting holes, and fill them with the imported soil. He builds stone walls against the wind, puts up trellises for climbing plants, and excavates the marsh pond to install a concrete dike. The work reshapes both land and water. Grandmother warns that raising the marsh by eight inches will displease the junipers; Sophia is more interested in the speckled and red water lilies planned for the pond.

After the wind falls and the rain stops, Sophia’s father begins planting in earnest. At sunrise, he carries a twelve-foot poplar to a pit above the beach meadow, braces it with ropes, and lays roses in the heather. The pause between this labor and the first growth is part of spring’s drama: the bulbs open, roots move through the slime inside the dike, and stems and stalks take hold across the island. When Sophia spots Gudoshnik emerging, Grandmother hurries out with her glasses. Together they examine the tulip’s first green spear.

Growth and its costs

Spring rewards the planting with a gentle profusion. Buds swell into shiny leaves, the Dutch bulbs rise, and the new roots spread. The poplar is the exception: it remains bare among its supporting ropes, unchanged from the day it arrived. That contrast keeps the season’s promise from becoming a guarantee. Growth is abundant, but individual plants do not all answer the same way.

The fine weather continues into June without rain, and the garden’s dependence on human intervention becomes increasingly visible. Plastic hoses, joined by brass couplings, run across the island to a pump beside a natural rainwater basin. A plastic cover slows evaporation. Twice a week, Sophia’s father pumps warm brown water through hoses and sprinklers, timing each plant’s allocation with an egg timer: one, three, or five minutes according to its needs.

The system protects the new garden by reserving water for it, but the rest of The island pays the price. Its turf dries and curls at the edges; several spruces die. Thunderstorms bring heavy rain along the coast yet do not reach the island, while the basin’s level keeps falling. Sophia prays for rain, but the drought continues. One evening the pump gurgles, the hose slackens, and the basin is empty, its plastic cover collapsed into wrinkled folds at the bottom. The season that seemed to fulfill the promise of renewal has made the limits of the project—and of its water supply—impossible to ignore.

Spring in the seasonal cycle

The book’s spring is therefore neither a simple return to the untouched nor a straightforward triumph of cultivation. It brings the family back to a landscape they alter with imported soil, a dike, trellises, and irrigation; the resulting growth is real, but it depends on sustained labor and a finite store of water. The detailed succession from bulbs to roots to leaves gives spring the force of an observable process, while the bare poplar and the drying native turf mark what that process cannot promise or protect.

Set against August’s preparations for leaving, spring also belongs to a rhythm that exceeds any one planting season. Firewood is stored for the family’s next return, and the island’s rooms and tools are gradually arranged around absence and future use. Spring is the season when plans become living things, but the drought shows that arrival and renewal do not cancel vulnerability: the island remains subject to weather, and even careful provision cannot make its resources inexhaustible.