Starting Early.

The leaves are not yet out, but the sunshine is dazzling. So much extraordinary, unmitigated light is flooding me in a kind of shiney March madness. Everything is bare and beautiful, raw and stark and shadowless.

The bright early spring has tempted me to start mothing earlier than usual. The nights are still frosty, but some wonderful moths are flying already. Most early moths have over wintered as adults and tend to be restful shades of brown and grey to avoid  predation. I have found modest quakers, hebrew characters and brindled beauties. This speckled specimen reminds me of a garibaldi biscuit as it scuttles quickly under  the few emergent leaves to wait out the bright spring sunshine until peaceful night time.

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When the time is right.

Acorns have waited all winter to be in the right place at the right time and today the brown shells split, the simple leaves began to swell and the powerful root began to push down into the soil. A drift of acorns half trodden into the mud decided today was the day and erupted into life.

I couldn’t resist picking up a handful of nuts that were not yet attached to the soil and I took them home in my pocket. I have laid them in a pot of soil from the oldest part of the garden, where hopefully the good things that trees need will bind with the emerging roots and seedlings will grow.

Like most people, I have never grown an oak tree, but I have a feeling that it really is about  time to try!

Winston and the slow worm – again!

The garden is waking up. There are bees on the willow flowers, daffodils braving the frosty clods and Winston the cat has caught another slow worm. These warm, smooth, legless lizards spend the winter, safe in compost heap, but when the sunshine rouses them, my cat is waiting to pounce.

The good news is that he doesn’t hurt them. With gentleness unusual in a feline killer, he picks them up in his mouth, brings them to the nearest human and drops them unmolested at our feet. The slowworm stays very still, is happy to be picked up and Winston mewls and yowls proudly until he is praised and petted for his “ catch”.

The reptile is returned to the warm rotting heap; Winston frisks about full of the joys of spring and the sun shines on!

“Dusk and shiver”

The Lady of  Shallot      by Lord Tennyson 

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four grey walls, and four grey towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.

…….

In the summer a stand of aspen trees quiver, their leaves dusk and shiver in the slightest breeze and I always think of these lovely lines from Tennyson’s famous poem. I saw the first wild cherry blossom today in a sheltered bend in the river, but we are still a long way from leaves, so I thought I would share a photo of the unexpectedly bright green catkins of the aspen sharing a branch with mistletoe, as winter and spring swap places.

 

 

Dancing with Kites.

 

Over the garden a red kite mewling like a kitten, so close I could reach out my hand and brush the polished perfect feathers.

Kite silhouette again the racing  blue sky, the cat crouches low and the bird is gone, piping and laughing into the clouds.

And now another and another.

They twist around each other, wings touching the roof tops delighting in the fitful wind, hail flung after them and the sunlight chasing them.

Flame forked tails angle and the birds turn, quartering the spring sky into slabs of changing colour. Four birds over my tiny garden, calling to each other for the whole spring day.

Flirting, testing partners, laughing: dancing.

 

..Mad March

I could be in  Tenerife right now. I’m sure the sun is shining and the waves are glittering, but I’m not there, and I’m glad!  The problem with other places is the getting to them. Hours of checking in and checking out, passports, cramped seats and jampacked flights full of people you hope never to see again are just the prelude. Then there is the location of the hotel. Then there is the finding of the place you so hopefully booked, so long ago, which looked such a great deal, but turns out to be hours away again from where you expected, adjacent to a motorway and next to a noisy bar and under some piledriving construction.

I know where my houses is, and I like it. The wind may be roaring, the sun intermittent, fretful and only momentarily  glorious, but the bed is comfortable, the food and wine to my taste, and  the cats on the sofa are relaxed and purring, purring.

The mad March  wind blows the first spring flowers up and away into a noisy maelstrom . Rain splatters against the windows and into my face as I race into the garden to chase a flying garden chair, but I right now I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else and I don’t regret my cancelled holiday for a moment.

There goes the bin over again, but here comes the sun and I think that was a rainbow!

 

 

 

 

Spring on the kitchen table.

TS Elliot said « April is the cruelest month » as it stirs dull desire, but I dont think he was a gardener. Shoring up the ruins of Western civilisation in his poetry must have left him little time  to appreciate that March is a far crueler month, as the anticipation of spring is so sharp it hurts.

I am impatient by nature. After the first snow drops and catkins prove winter is dead, then I want full leafed, green pulsing life back in my garden and in the fields and fast! I want long grass and swaying trees, butterflies, birds and moths, but must make do with worm casts and buds that seem clenched as tight shut as a fist.

To compensate I turn to the garden centre and buy spicey perfumed pinks and heady jasmine to speed things along. I know they will languish before long for lack of light, but for now I can bathe in thier perfume between the pepper pots and salt cellar, as I wait for the firsfists to unfurl.

Spring on the window sill.

Outside the dead twig is king. We are weeks away from  buds breaking here, but the kitchen window is a good place to tempt the flowers to appear at eye level right now.

Forsythia is the most forgiving of bushes. All year it is sturdy and green, but in spring time, the bare wood is covered in simple lemon green star flowers that erupt for every knarly inch.

I never knew you could pick forsythia twigs months before they flower in the garden and enjoy them inside. Thanks to the generosity of bloggers I read about how you could plunge them into water for 24 hours and leave them some where cool before bringing them into the house and waiting for them to flower. I was delighted when I tried this and watched an unprepocessing bunch of twigs burst into flower on the kitchen window sill  in darkest winter.

Since then I have become lazier and realised that that the cooling transitional phase isn’t needed, I just select the twigs from my lovely leggy shrub, shove them into a tall  vase and wait for the stars to come out!