Joys of Spring

Reminds me of a line from a Dylan Thomas book or poem I read once Bagitha. "Nothing grows in that garden but washing and love".

Though I'm sure your garden grows beautifully!

There are six kids, aged nine to eleven, running around my garden enjoying the rapidly cooling lovely spring air. DD won't come in for her tea.

Wall to wall - cloudless sky - mirror-like sea.

Go into hospital one o'clock Saturday. Not to eat or drink after ten. According to the blurb that came in the post, I appear to be male.

It is 7pm ...I still don't need to put the light on!! Wonderful weather all day too!!

bagitha - "Heard of dipping in to GN between tasks?"

Yep. at the moment I'm burning the rhubarb pudding.

There's stuff in my washing machine but when I went to take it out it was bone dry - the door of the machine needs a good prod (kick) to lock. This hadn't happened. It has now.

It is glorious... and you have just reminded me .... there is stuff in the washing machine.

bagitha Your pleasure is infectious...I'm wearing a huge
Our lovely daughter-in-law [mummy of wee man] is celebrating her birthday. Wee man now has a scooter, and is hurtling at high speed around the park. Wish we were there

Sunshine warm enough to dry washing!

Taking Cubs on an activity weekend in March and getting warm, dry weather in Scotland, warm and dry enough to sit on the ground without getting a muddy backside! Well, I didn't. They did, but kids are talented that way.

Zippety-doo-dah
Zippy-aye-ai
My, oh my, what a wonderful day....

etc

Wood anemones out here. Along with banks of primroses, celandines, white violets. Thank you Milton Keynes Parks Trust - they look after the acres of parkland, including the sides of all our leafy boulevards. Some really good primrose lined dual carriageways at the moment. Not to mention repeated waves of blackthorn. And trees busting their buds - horse chestnuts all sticky and pleated. An acer producing tiny bouquets of lime green blooms on its twigs and ash pushing out what looks for a day or so like some sort of nasty cankers that turn into their strange blackish flowers. Compost bins emptied for the first time in about 3 years. Garden pretty much tidied before i head off to the other side of the world. Very very strange leaving at this my favourite time of year to go to autumn. It will all look so different when i come back.

B

who me? or B?

Ha ha indeed but your profusion of posts makes one wonder if there are more than one of you?

Visions of carbon ducking and weaving around the corridors of GN, trying to find Bagitha-free corners.
I just spotted the first forge-me-not peeping out in the garden.
Feels more than a tad weird to think that a week today I will be headed off to autumn!

Every thread!? Ha! Ha! It could be that I'm as omnipresent as you suggest but I think you'll find, if you check your facts, that you are mistaken.

Or it could be that I really am as super efficient and amazing as you think .

Or maybe you're just paranoid .

Heard of dipping in to GN between tasks? Heard of 'watching' certain threads?

bagitha how do you find time to do any gardening at all, what with your habit of posting on every thread.......? Not trying to have a go, just curious.

No wreckage in my garden! Just life being untidy.

As it is.

Ted Hughes was a bit morbid, poor chap.

Mine are mainly wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus. If we weren't so tidy-minded, we wouldn't mind dead daffodil leaves on roadsides. We'd remember that while ever the leaves are green, they are feeding the bulbs for next year. Not to mention allowing the seed heads to mature and spread seed naturally.

I leave my daff leaves and seed heads to do their bit as untidily as they like. Result? – more every year with no interference from me.

But the millions of daffs on the roadsides will be dead for at least six weeks or more before they can be mowed. "which will leave this whole places wrecked"

I hate areas of dead (cultivated) daffs.....

in fact I only like tiny wild daffs in pale drifts......in wild places....dying gracefully among the grasses.

Down with mono-cultures of gaudy short-lived daffs I say

i love many of Ted Hughes's poems, but he was often a grumpy git.

Hughes feeling a bit grumpy that day?
My small daffy are lovely today, warm southerly wind blowing.

In the shade of the north-west house face
It is twelve degrees C (rounded up),
But around my garden in many clumps
Are three hundred and fifty-five daffodils
And many more bunches of flowerless leaves
Feeding the bulbs of newborn narcissi
For flowering later this year or next.
I could not do hard work gardening today
So I counted sunshine flowers
And gathered dried stalks of Slender St John's Wort and dock
To bind into fire–lighting bundles.

Ted Hughes: "Spring Nature Notes"

A spurt of daffodils, stiff, quivering -
Plumes, blades, creases, Guardsmen
At attention

Like sentinels at the tomb of a great queen.
(Not like what they are - the advance guard
Of a drunken slovenly army

Which will leave this whole place wrecked.)

No-one around here! (Not 'arf!).