Garden Love

It's ridiculously cold here today. A bitter, easterly gale is roaring down the valley and we're right in it's teeth. Our bedroom is in the roof and the wind has whistled and moaned around the eaves all night long. I'm yearning for spring and mild days. Oh I do miss my summer garden. Pottering, dead heading, bringing home a new treasure from the WI market and finding somewhere to squeeze it in. We've only been in the house for just over a year so last summer was the first for me in this garden and it was complete delight - ok very wet but I loved it, we all did. My garden is so precious, a sanctuary, the place I feel most relaxed and very peaceful. But it's fun too and a place to play. I feel a bit imprisoned in the house and find myself gazing out of the window, willing spring to come.

Earlier in the week it was mild enough to spend an hour tiding the borders and sorting out the shed but I long to be out there with frothing flowers for company. Time seems to go so slowly in February and I find it torturous so I'm getting out my summer pictures to cheer up a blustery, dreary day.

But there are good sides to this winter battering. The garden is full of birds. Not so many people in our road seem to feed them, apart from us and our neighbour, so we're mobbed especially on raw days like today.

I've been passionate about garden birds ever since one bitter winter when I was around eleven and my sister and cousins and I began a bird club. We fed our little feathered friends then watched them from the kitchen window and drew endless pictures.

I'm very appreciative of the wildlife education my parents gave me, a little too enthusiastically on occasion though it has to be said (I'll always remember mum getting me out of bed aged 15 to come and look at a woodpecker on the apple tree - you can imagine how unimpressed I was at that age!)

Today though I'm such an enthusiast and it's something that has become a special bond between my little chaps and I. Daddy is a master of junk modelling, train building etc, etc but bugs, birds, flowers etc are mummy's forte.

Our garden is very small, perhaps 30 ft square, but our position is just perfect for attracting birds. We're close to a river, the water meadows, farmland and a wood so we get all sorts of unusual visitors.

Reed buntings are as numerous as sparrows, although I'd never seen one at all before moving here. In the winter the birch tree is alive with siskins, red poll and long tailed tits and the ivy hedge is home to a family of wrens, as well as the more usual tits, finches and thrushes. We keep a list of everything in, or flying over, the garden that we see and already it includes sparrowhawk, barn owl, pink-footed goose and even cormorants.

I find it so relaxing to sit curled up with a brew, snuggled up from the cold and watch our visitors flit from feeder to bird table and back to the tree and hedges again. Miles more interesting than a fish tank in my opinion but it does the same job! Wish I had my own pictures to share but my camera really is useless for photographing anything more than six foot away.

Finally the bulbs are coming through. In the autumn we stuffed all the buckets and pots full with crocus, muscari and narcissi and before long the patio will be bursting with colour.

I can't wait, everything is so very bleak and it feels an eternity since my borders looked like this. But if I look very hard I can see clusters of forget-me-nots forming, primroses in bud and a beautiful, deep pink pulmonaria is actually in flower.
Well, think I'll pop back to the window now and see if the bullfinch or my favourite the robin is back. Batten down the hatches and stay cosy everyone.