Joys of Spring

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

I thought yew was poison to ruminants?

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.

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.

Fascinating!

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.

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.

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.

Excellent!

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

I love that, butty. Thank you .

Hope you have calmed down now!
Some of the main roads here look as if they are lined with snow covered bushes, such is the extravagance of the blackthorn.

Still plenty of real snow here, but today I went for a long walk in the forest and saw my first wood crocus. It seemed like a harbinger of happier times ahead.

DD is playing out in the rain with her pals.

Love it!

DD just breezed in wet, muddy, and full of the joys of spring . She's now munching cake and reading her book propped up on the table.

Sounds like a nice moment B.
Not raining here and I just went for a very brisk walk to the PO and back. Walked up the only road in the town that inspires house envy. Old houses with huge gardens and overlooks mediaeval settlement (site of). White violets and pink almond blossom!

Oh, that sounds a picture, Jess.

A golden day -
Clumps of daffodils self-bedded on the beach -
Gorse glowing in the hedgerows -
Forsythia illuminating the far corner of the garden -
Marsh marigolds on the banks of the burn -
Primroses clustered in the woodland beyond -
All turning their heads
Towards the welcome glow
Of

Lovely super

Yesterday was our first proper spring day this year
And I saw my first lesser celandines today.
This morning has been beautiful too:
I'm sure I've topped up my vitamin D
Working the the garden
Under a bright blue sky.
The wind has 'got up' now
And brought cloud cover
And a rain haze over the hills
But I have brought in dry wood
And donated no-longer-needed hen food
To a friend.