This last week the winter eased its grip. Snowdrops waning in the hedgerows and their energy suddenly dimmed. Nettles flushing and those fierce first stings which let you know that snowdrop splitting season is nearing its end for us in the hedgerows. There are bright primroses to replace them and, in perfect handover, the first of the wild daffodils. Wild garlic already green in the woods, joining the green hellebores. Splays of bee orchid foliage in the top meadow. The sun lighting up the flowering poplars. Frogs spawning in the pond and the song of blackbirds at six in the evening. Still light then for the first time, darkness waning and the just warmth on the brief appearance of the sun. 

The next season within seasons has started. The tip into growth which you can see manifest everywhere, in the gloss of new grass and buds swelling on the trees. The Prunus cerasifera is already in flower, tiny pinpricks of clearest white and swiftly then a cloud of blossom. We are so pleased to have planted trees as soon as we got here for you can already walk amongst them and look up into canopies already so full of life. When the rain stops – for it is hard to remember more than two days in sequence without it since new year – the bees are out. Foraging in first flowers on the pulmonaria and the bright studwork of golden celandine on the sunny banks. In the wet ground under the crack willow, where we inserted a split of the parasitic Lathraea clandestina onto a cut made in the the willow roots, the strangeness of this interloper has already begun. Glowing ultraviolet in dim, rain-laden days. Below, the gunneras starting to stir and emerge from their winter chrysalis.