I have just returned from a week overseas. A week of spring at its most exuberant, and one in which so much accelerates. First leaf in the trees, the meadows on the rise and the garden surging. On the morning I left, I rose early to walk, absorb and to try to be present. To slow time by looking, rather than planning the next move to keep ahead or on top of the perpetual motion of garden tasks. Our given state as gardeners, despite the fact that one of the primary reasons we garden is to be in the here and now. In spite of best attempts to be witness to the very morning, my early walk was tinged by the pathos of what I might miss during my absence. A complete chapter that in our case here, is marked by the first blossoming of the crab apples.

Their presence on the banks behind the house has been carefully planned and, twelve years after planting, they are beginning to be greater than the sum of their parts. Significant enough to have the gravity it takes to be the happening on the hill that I had imagined when I staked out their positions in the winter of 2012. More than a decade on and the young trees are in their first flush of adulthood, reaching to touch and beginning to arch over the back track to make a tunnel between the hedge on th eother side and the open slopes that rise up behind us.