Christmas has long held the crown when it comes to nostalgia and rightly so. There’s a reason that particular magic is so universal… the tree, the baubles you’ve had for years, the smell of pine needles and mince pies. There’s something about hunkering down in winter.., wrapping up warm, cocooning… that makes the past feel close enough to touch. But lately I’ve been feeling a quieter, more nature-driven kind of nostalgia. One that doesn’t arrive with carols and candlelight, but with the sting of a nettle and the sound of a distant ice cream van. It turns out that Christmas isn’t the only season that knows how to pull you back.

Summer nostalgia sneaks up on you and catches you off guard - a flash of purple clover scattered across a field, the sharp sting of a nettle on bare legs, the soft buzzing of bees on a warm afternoon. And suddenly you’re six years old again, and the world is enormous and the day will last forever.

I don’t think children are taught to love wildflowers. They just do, instinctively, the way they love puddles and mud and eating blackberries from the bush.
Purple clover grew everywhere when I was small - in the scrubby edges of playing fields and sprawling across sunny meadows. It grew alongside tall, swaying grass and bright cheerful buttercups. So pretty under a sunny sky, so dramatic under a grey, rain-heavy sky. 
I would run through those meadows without a care in the world, heading down into the little lanes where there would inevitably be nettles growing in abundance. We all knew the ritual… The sharp, white and red sting of a nettle - almost always on the soft inside of the arm, or the back of the knee, somewhere tender and unprepared - followed immediately by the scramble for a dock leaf. Cool, damp, a little waxy. You pressed it to the sting and rubbed.
I love that this knowledge was so often passed down to us not by teachers or books, but by other children. It was folk medicine for the under-tens. There’s something quietly wonderful about that…

And then, in the distance… You heard it before you saw it. That sweet melody of the ice cream van. Suddenly there was a scramble for coins, a sprint to the end of the road. Then a race against the sun to finish your ice cream or lolly before it all ran down your wrist or fell to the floor. 

Christmas nostalgia is warm and soft and perhaps sometimes, even a little curated - and we love it for exactly that reason. It comes packaged with its own music soundtrack and its own smell, and it arrives on schedule, reliably, like Santa Claus himself.
Summer nostalgia is a different creature entirely. It’s wilder, less polished, and it lives in the memory of a sting, a particular wildflower scent, the cooing of wood pigeons on a morning. It doesn’t wait for a specific date. It catches you in brief moments, in the tinkling of an ice cream van, in the sound of a lawn mower on a warm Sunday afternoon.
And in that brief moment, the memory of your childhood summer is there again - golden and sun-filled and joyful.