The cold air of mid April sweeps the down but the sun warms the sheltered pockets behind dense thickets of dogwood, hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble and whitebeam topped by fresh strands of clematis and honeysuckle. The whitebeam is coming into leaf and trees are lit with fat candles under the blue sky. Flowering plants are few in the…
Tag: Spring
Sissinghurst’s Rite of Spring
The gardeners continue to create colour wheel harmonies; bright and gaudy; cool and relaxed; the garden compartments have diverse compositions. The spring bulbs, like brass, shout the loudest with purple and red fanfares everywhere. More muted arrangements in spring greens and whites are often simpler tunes in minor keys. All the many troughs, large and small, have…
Warming Denge Woods
The great swathe of woodland south of Chilham in East Kent is coming alive in the unseasonal Mediterranean warmth of early April. Birch, hazel and hornbeam are in early leaf, whitebeams too, but the stolid oak, ash and beech remain in bud. Chiffhcaffs are everywhere, shouting their monotonous zip-zap, zip-zap from the tree-tops. A few blackcaps sing…
Chalkhurst and Hartnips Woods
Above the village of Eynsford across a wide fallow field freshly sprayed with herbicide, sits a long strip of broadleaved woodland. Under a blue sky, a single swallow flies across the field calling. A slow worm rests under an old piece of matting and brimstones work the dandelions in the floristically dull field margin; a…
Soğuksu Millî Parkı
The winding road from the spa town of Kizilcahamam leads to Soğuksu Millî Parkı, literally translated as Cold Water National Park, a remnant patch of old pine forest that covers the steep hills. The protection may have been to safeguard the precious water, but the forest also holds petrified trees as the area was volcanic some 10 million years ago. Whatever…
Early Spring Days
At the bottom of the slope in Hilly Wood, the cyclamen-flowered daffodils are specks of mustard yellow above avocado green leaves; the carpet spreads between the bare, silver birch coppice under a dull pearl sky. Below, the streamside alders are knobbly, like varicosed legs, and two trunks enjoy a prolonged, puckered kiss. In the pale sunshine at Bough Beech,…
Great Dixter
Great Dixter on a grey afternoon in May with rain threatening. The old manor sinks into the gentle hillside under steep-pitched roofs and tall chimneys; an Elizabethan galleon on a sea of meadows and woodlands that flow across this quiet corner of the Weald. The fields are full of buttercups and orchids but behind the high walls of neat-clipped yew Taxus baccata…
Bore Place
Just round the corner from Bough Beech, among the mosaic of woods and pastures of the Weald, is Bore Place, a fine old brick and tile manor house. Today, it is the home of Commonwork, a charitable trust that seeks to educate, inspire and support people through contact with sustainable agriculture and nature. The place is at its heart a…
South Charente Spring
The fine chateau at Villebois-Lavalette sits on a low hill, the medieval fortifications speak of a long and combustible history: an Iron Age fortification; a Roman castrum; an English stronghold during the Hundred Years War; the seat of Dukes in the age of aristocracy; a prison after the Revolution; and today a battleground for summer tourists. The land hereabouts is…
Hilly Wood
An erudite local botany blog tells of a wood full of brilliant yellow, cyclamen-flowered daffodils Narcissus cyclamineus. Now is the time to visit and so we head for Hilly Wood near Cranbrook. N. cyclamineus is an introduced and naturalised species from northwest Spain and northern Portugal, where five daffodil species are endemic, according to a local nature conservation NGO from Galicia. The…
Early Spring
The two churches of Trimley St Martin and Trimley St Mary sit side by side; one thrives and the other crumbles. The reason two substantial churches were built so close together for neighbouring village parishes is apparently down to a family feud. The resulting Darwinian struggle for congregations had only one conclusion. Poor St Mary; the insult is compounded…
Montenegro – an introduction
I am staying in Montenegro for the Spring to try to learn something of the wildlife and ecology. Based on what I have read, here is a short introduction to the nature of the country: Montenegro is a small country, not much larger than the department of Dordogne in France, and rectangular in shape. One short edge borders…