The Spring Openings

Spring is not a date, it is a migration, and it comes up the map from the Gulf every year on roughly the same schedule, camellias in January, azaleas in March, the whole coastal South in bloom while the North is still scraping windshields. The travelers who understand this stop waiting for spring and start meeting it, which is one of the oldest smart moves in American travel and somehow still an uncrowded one.

The spring openings are the weeks when a place is at its annual best and knows it. The gardens of Charleston and Beaufort behind their gates, the old squares of the Lowcountry under new green, New Orleans between its festivals with the sweet olive on the air, and the small Gulf towns where the water warms first and the season opens with oysters still on the menu. These are short windows, two or three weeks each, and the regulars book them a year ahead precisely because they are short.

This edition maps the migration. It goes to New Orleans wearing its spring, to Charleston and Beaufort in the blooming weeks, to Bluffton as the May River season opens, and to Cedar Key, the old Florida town where the Gulf spring arrives before anyone else's and the pace never changes to meet it.

Watch the bloom reports the way skiers watch snow, hold your dates loosely if you can, and go south earlier than feels reasonable, since the great mistake with southern spring is arriving in May for a show that peaked in March. The season moves. The trick, once a year, is to be standing in front of it.