Born in February

• AquariusThe Water-Bearer
• PiscesThe Fishes

A February birthday begins as Aquarius. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Pisces on the 18th of February in 35 years (the first in 1949) and the 19th in 72, in universal time. A birthday on 18 February or 19 February is therefore Aquarius or Pisces depending on the year, and in the year of a crossing on the hour; the page for each of those dates gives the sign and the moment of the crossing for every year.

Every other date in February had one sign all day in every one of those years: Aquarius up to the 17th and Pisces from the 20th. Those are dates in universal time, though, and a date begins earlier east of Greenwich and later to the west of it, so in some years the 17th and 20th were also the local date of a crossing somewhere far enough away; their pages list the years.

In the astrological tradition Aquarius is an air sign and a fixed one, ruled by Saturn, and by Uranus in modern astrology. Printed tables give it as 20 January – 18 February; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of January and left it on the 18th or 19th of February.

In the astrological tradition Pisces is a water sign and a mutable one, ruled by Jupiter, and by Neptune in modern astrology. Printed tables give it as 19 February – 20 March; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 18th or 19th of February and left it on the 20th or 21st of March.

Amethyst has been February's stone since the list was drawn up in 1912, and nothing has been added since. It is quartz, coloured violet by traces of iron that natural radiation from the surrounding rock has turned into a colour centre; without the radiation the iron gives no violet at all. Its Greek name, amethystos, means not drunk, from the old belief that it kept the wearer sober. Heat undoes the colour: above about 440 °C amethyst turns yellow, and most of the citrine sold today began as amethyst, so February's stone and one of November's are, underneath, the same mineral. Large deposits in Brazil, Uruguay and Zambia keep it among the most affordable of the birthstones.

The 1912 list is the one the National Association of Jewelers adopted at Kansas City that August, as G. F. Kunz printed it in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), with a birth-stone for each month and an alternate for some; today's list is the one GIA publishes. The two lists compared →

The violet and the primrose are both small flowers of the European woodland and hedge bank, and both reach February only by being early. The violet gave its name to the colour, not the other way round: English had the flower by about 1300 and the colour word later in the same century. Its scent seems to come and go because the ionones in it briefly numb the very receptors that smell them. The primrose is the prima rosa, the first rose of the year, and it was in the primrose that Charles Darwin described the two forms of flower, pin and thrum, that oblige insects to carry pollen from one plant to another.

The meanings usually given today are a summary of the birth-flower lists printed now. The older ones are quoted from the dictionary named, under the heading it prints them. Birth flowers and the language of flowers →