The London streets, parks and churchyards where I found magnolias in bloom, and when to catch them before the petals drop.

Every year I forget how sudden it is. One week the city is doing its usual grey, wet, six-o'clock-and-already-dark routine, and the next there are magnolias going off like fireworks on residential streets and someone's sitting outside a pub in a t-shirt looking mildly surprised at themselves. London doesn't ease into spring. It sort of flinches into it. I took this set of photos over a few weeks of just going where the light looked good, which in practice meant checking the w