Rain in early May has helped alleviate the dearth of April showers. Along narrow lanes, the drifts of bluebells, interspersed with cow parsley, campions and seeding stitchwort, are already overwhelmed by ferns. The succession of buckler, lady, hart’s-tongue, male, scaly male and soft shield – the latest to unfurl from its crozier-like fronds – will soon be topped by rampant bracken, now entwined in bryony.
Swags of hawthorn blossom overhang neglected uncut hedgerows, and landmark clumps of beech have lost that initial pellucidity of luminous foliage. Like linear stunted woods, the battered, regularly shorn deciduous growth on hedgebanks sprouts a diversity of greenery.
Before breakfast, I mooch around our cool woodland garden, where the melodious song of blackcaps now joins that of chiffchaff, competing with the piercing song of wren. The exceptionally thick blossoms of cherry, pear and apple are all finished, much of it blown off in cold east winds before the end of April. Short-lived but particularly beautiful was the white foam of bullion cherries and the delicate pink of the venus pippin apple.
A sparse set of little green fruits shows on the 30ft-high blizzard burcombe cherry (named after a tree that survived the 1891 storm), one of the first to be grafted by James, my brother-in-law, before he and my sister Mary established their own orchard of local top fruit varieties.
In the adjoining fruit cage, I remove tufts of bulbous grass and mulch compost around the blueberry, blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. Cowslips thrive here, along with alpine strawberries, columbine and alkanet, and I dig some for spreading about the garden. Meanwhile, a large grass snake lies coiled in warmth beneath black plastic covering last year’s heap.
Beyond the garden, where abundant blooms of wisteria, red hawthorns, azaleas and the judas tree seem better than ever, and the last tree to leaf is the mulberry, South Devon cattle have been rotated since mid-April on their summer keep opposite. Across the parish, pastures for bullocks and sheep, first-cut silage fields and germinated cereals await more rain for productive growth.
