Signs of Spring
It’s cold today but spring is on the way. Tulips and daffodils are coming up around the garden. Not flowering as yet. The euphorbia by the side wooden fence has its hardly noticeable green flowers. They have a long season, so they will be noticed. The kerria by the Dare to Dream stage has its small yellow flowers, like crinkled yellow paper. The Viburnam tinus has its sprigs of tiny white flowers, although hardly a sign of spring as this shrub flowers through the winter. The magnolia buds, near the front gate, are swelling. Its large white flowers are majestic. There won’t be many but sometimes few is better as you notice the individuals.
By the greenhouse, the hazel has its long yellow catkins, three or four inches long. These are the male flowers, like the silver birch which has its male catkins too. They await the female catkins. The papyrus in the pond is approaching a metre in height. Along the Nile in places they are over three metres high, sometimes blocking tributaries in their bounty. The first paper was made from them by the ancient Egyptians. Let ours grow some more, and perhaps we could try making papyrus from it.
No adult frogs yet in the pond. This is always chancy. Last year, we had twenty or so come over a three week period, but it depends how many have survived, with the summer heat taking its toll, predators like birds and cats, and disease. Early March we are more likely to see them, and then the mating, if we are fortunate, to give us a pond full of tadpoles. Then the pond becomes the centrepiece as we watch the wriggling spawn, the first hatchlings and in a week or two they are all over the pond.
Today, we have a sonorous robin, high in our sycamore. I saw it last week there too, so that must be its territory. This is the mating season, and there’s a lot more birdsong. Last year, none of our bird boxes were utilised, in past seasons by blue tits. I opened them up to see if they needed cleaning, but there was no nest material in any of them.
These cold days our new shelter is used more and more. It is slightly warmer than outside and keeps the wind off. As the days grow longer, and the sun rises in the sky, we are wondering how much more energy our two solar panels will give us. We have two batteries to store the electrical energy. We can’t quite power Forest Gate but we have boiled water in our urn, for tea and coffee. And we’ll use our stored energy for lighting at our meeting next week. At the last, at the end of January, we had a small heater, a very small heater, which did raise the temperature by a few degrees, though we still needed to be bundled up in our winter togs.
The Emporium (or Number 8) has given us their wheelbarrow. It is a remnant from the 2012 Olympics which was centred on the Olympic Park, Stratford. I wonder whether it was used in the opening ceremony when there was all the building and digging to illustrate the industrial revolution. We did have some artificial grass from the Olympics, but that wore through, so it’s just the wheel barrow to remind us of Super Saturday (4th August 2012) when Jessica Ennis-Hill, Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford had us all cheering. Jessica completed the heptathlon, streaking away in the 800m, the final event, to take gold. Greg won the long jump and Mo the 10,000m, and then a week later got a glorious double with the 5000m gold. Well, we have a wheelbarrow. Small things can jog a memory.