Joys of Spring

Fabulous Butternut. I have been out for the afternoon to play with babies, and have come home feeling equally tranquil

Excellent!

My day started full of clamour
Feeling cross at GNHQ's manner
So took myself off outside
To listen to the breeze
In next door's pine
And listened to my bed sheets
Snapping and cracking
Just like me, at GNHQ.
So when the line pole crashed
Onto the gravel
I took myself off
For some silence
And sat under the cherry tree
Full of fat blossom buds
On the grass
Just newly cut and ruffed up,
Discombobulated, like me
And sometimes, I though
In the seeking of tranquillity
Is when I'm most alive.

Zoologist DH agrees about deer eyesight. He also says that browsers like deer always take young tips of plants. So that would explain it without their needing good colour vision — which might not help them in the poor light of dusk and dawn anyway.

The roe deer that visit us like bolete mushrooms as well, and tulip flowers, and Japanese anemone flowers, and red campion. They even eat a few bluebells! The don't eat peonies and [I wish they would but they won't] eat rhododendrons!

The particular leaves the monkeys were eating were reddish when young and less toxic but became green as they aged and they were on large trees in which the monkeys were climbing, so I guess colour vision helped there. I think it was a David Attenborough prog but I've forgotten which series.

Maybe deer distinguish by taste of texture. i don't think hoofed animals see in colour do they.
I think i have just sussed why no return of my froglets. They take more than a year to become sexually mature. Dammit. I just read - 3 years. Another 2 to wait. Curses.
Someone told me the other day about their friend filling in a pond in their garden and then finding the lawn covered in frogspawn the following spring.

Fascinating!

Oh, and they only go for the very young shoots. I remember watching a programme about monkeys and the development of colour vision — they need it so that they can distinguish young, less poisonous leaves from older ones. deer must be able to distinguish too.

Roe deer eat small amounts of all kinds of toxic stuff. I guess the fact that they browse on a whole variety of plant material helps them deal with the poisons in things like yew and ivy.

I thought yew was poison to ruminants?

We have two huge xmas tree stumps in our garden. They must have blocked half the light into the house when they were, um, trees. I'm growing honeysuckle over one of them.Well, it's growing itself – plonked itself there and I just encouraged it over the stump by tying some of the shoots together across the middle of the stump.

Today I also freed a baby yew tree from its cage that I built around it five years ago to stop the deer eating it. I think it's big enough to fend for itself now and anyway, I needed the chicken wire to contain my newest compost heap – about one and a half metres long. I make them like small whales. Yes, the garden does produce enough to fill them. This one will take a year to fill, which is about right. I'm starting this one with dead fern and great blankets of what I believe is a kind of liverwort that came off our 'holding wall' (stops the hill falling into the house ). I need to go and look it up now. don't worry, there's lots left.

super, I planted three yellow flags in the boggiest bit of our garden four years ago. Last year there were more than I could easily count so they must be happy there. Looking forward to them flowering.

It's horribly foggy here, I can hardly see the end of my garden.

The marsh marigold and wild yellow iris are pushing through the boggy soil. They will look glorious in a week os so.

Yes my pink camellia just came out. Gorgeous. Clashes horribly with the daffs and blue things but it is in a pot next to the patio doors.

My next door neighbour did that with an Xmas tree. It is now as high as the telephone wires, shades my raspberries,is horribly spindly and interferes with my view of Wales! It is the one thing we disagree over.
Apparently it reminds her of her babies! They are now in their fourties!

Yes, though some of my hellebores are deep red and I have a bright pink camellia and 2 pinkish rhododendrons praeox. It is all getting quite colourful.

Lovely to see the blues as well as the yellows isn't it *annobel"

Dog tired yet, JessM? I have a plethora of violets and today I found that the pulmonaria was coming out. Masses of hellebores too.

We have got a fir tree that was a little three foot-ish indoor Xmas tree when we planted it out back in the early seventies. It must now be about 35 ft high, and it's really beautiful on a sunny, blue sky day (like today). When you look up at it (it's on a bank) you can see it is absolutely laden with long, smooth, light brown fir cones.

Sometimes I look up at it and think, "Once, our Christmas fairy was on top of that!"

Jeni .

I have a bunch off daffs in my lounge and my eye keeps straying to their lovely yellow cheerfulness!

Snowdrops, violets, freesia - simple and yet stunning

Well I may not have frogspawn but I do have violets. The early scented kind which are the best. The later dog violets are pretty but no scent. (dog as in common or not so great? dog days, dog wood, dog tired, dog rough, dog daisies, bitofadog etc)
Got down on my knees on the gravel path and stuck my nose to them for that magical parma violet smell yesterday. Unlike all others.
Still peering pensively into the pond, both mine and the one across the way where I found spawn last year. I noticed on Saturday in Cambridgeshire that spring is a little more advanced there, so I am still living in hopes.

carol, both rats were probably of the same species but one was a hearty young thing and the other a great-great-great-great-grandma.

I have been gathering dead dried stems of Red Campion from my garden and bundling them up. They make excellent fire-lighters.

No violet flowers yet but the leaves are looking good.

Whatsup & Carol - Wild violets in grass are beautiful, aren't they! How lovely.

I have one single violet, too. Last year, I had lots, but can't see any more coming up yet.

I also had a visit from a rat an hour ago - it was eating up dropped seeds from the bird table. I shooed it quickly and I'll swear it swaggered as it walked off - cheek!

I saw a glossy brown rat with bright button eyes in my garden last year. It was a gorgeous animal. This one was a scruffy grey-brown - don't know if they are different, or the same type - does anyone know much about wild rats?