Bog Myrtle & Peat

Spring has a habit of running through my fingers. A million tiny moments blur into a raging glare of growth, restoration and pleasure. It becomes hard to pick between the images or pull them apart, and the overall effect is close to sensory overload.

This blog inevitably sags beneath the weight of this load, and so much goes unwritten. At the same time, the continuity of this narrative dies without picking out a few moments from the last ten days:

• The coconut smell of flowering gorse and the sound of cattle ripping up new grass. For one blissful moment, I had a glimpse of a calf stirring in the belly of its mother.
• Curlews displaying at dawn in the soft rain, overhung by a galaxy of larks and the constant, foetal “lub-dub” pulse of cuckoos.
• Drifts of wood anenomes blurring into burnside celandines and banks of buttery primroses.
• Blackcaps and grasshopper warblers singing in the gentle evening light, and a grey partridge calling with the first stars.
• A distant, wind-borne wobble of a blackcock over the frosted rushes.
• A dribble of seed in bare, crumbling soil – the oats are harrowed in, and now we wait for the rain to swell them up and start the rolling.

This last is a major moment, and the scene is now set for summer. Swallows and sand martins rush over the rolled soil, and I am gnawed with suspense.