Born in March

• PiscesThe Fishes
• AriesThe Ram

A March birthday begins as Pisces. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Aries, at the March equinox, on the 20th of March in 65 years and the 21st in 42 (the last in 2007), in universal time. A birthday on 20 March or 21 March is therefore Pisces or Aries 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 March had one sign all day in every one of those years: Pisces up to the 19th and Aries from the 22nd. 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 19th and 22nd were also the local date of a crossing somewhere far enough away; their pages list the years.

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.

In the astrological tradition Aries is a fire sign and a cardinal one, ruled by Mars. Printed tables give it as 21 March – 19 April; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 20th or 21st of March and left it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of April.

March has had the same two stones since 1912; what has changed is which comes first. The list drawn up that year made bloodstone the birth-stone and aquamarine its alternate, and the revision of 1952 turned them round, so aquamarine is the one printed first today. Aquamarine is beryl, the same mineral as emerald, coloured the blue of its Latin name, sea water, by iron. Bloodstone is dark green chalcedony spotted with red iron oxide, and a Christian legend holds that the spots are drops of Christ's blood that fell on green stone at the Crucifixion. The two are about as different as stones can be, which makes March the clearest case of why the question “what is my birthstone” can have two honest answers.

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 daffodil is March's flower and the national flower of Wales, and its name has wandered. It began as a variant of affodill, the asphodel, a different plant altogether, and was first used for the yellow narcissus in the 1590s; the d at the front may be the Dutch article, fused on by a trade that bought its bulbs from the Netherlands. The daffodil is also a crop. Galanthamine, a drug used to treat the symptoms of mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, is extracted from the bulbs on an industrial scale. Other alkaloids, lycorine above all, make the plant poisonous to cats and dogs, and the bulb most of all.

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 →