A week ago the frogs started spawning, an audible orgy in the brooklime in the pond and a marker in the last week of February that it is finally time to get things moving, now that winter is nearing its end. We have been working towards this moment for an industrious three months, strimming the ditch ahead of the snowdrops, narcissus and primroses, clearing and logging a fallen tree and coppicing this year’s hazels to open up ground for more primroses and to keep us in sticks and twigs for the garden.

Next week we will start the big cut back, having left the skeletons standing for the life we share the garden with and for being able to witness not only their rise, but also their fall in the growing cycle. But before we start, we’ve made a push to complete the last of the winter pruning. In early January, whilst the sap was still in the roots, the grape vines were cut back to hard knuckles and their wall trained framework and the mulberry raised gently where it is beginning to overhang the paths. Cut much later and they bleed, the vine a clear sap, the mulberry’s milky, the nutrition for spring growth all too easily wasted with bad timing. The roses were completed in January, since their buds begin to break here in mild weather in February. Then on to the autumn fruiting raspberries, which are simply razed to the ground and mulched and the thornless blackberry and tayberry, which are intricately woven onto a framework.