The year has turned. The shortest days are behind us. Still not light here much before nine and on a grey day dusk by three thirty but the days will lengthen now, slowly at first and then rapidly. By June the sun will barely dip below the horizon, the time of the ‘Simmer Dim’.
December brought almost daily gales and rain, the gales testing trees, the rain making the ground sodden. In the new meadow every footstep is a squelch, in the veg plot mud sticks to boots, too clarty to dig, spiky pin cushion seedlings of Rush dotting ground that in summer grew salads and spuds, the edge of moor plot doing its best to revert back nature. Close to the shore two wildlife ponds dug in spring are full to bursting, the ditch that feeds them running like a stream.
The garden is slumbering, waiting for longer and warmer days. Snowdrops have yet to push through the earth and tell of a coming spring. Perennials that lit borders bright with colour in summer are reduced to low leafy mounds, biding their time, a thin dressing of compost, green waste from the garden and tang and ware from the shore, covers the bare earth. Foliage and seed heads scorched by storm Babet, a three day visit of salt laden winds, have been cut back and composted. There are no lingering reds and golds of autumn here, no winter frosted seed heads. Gales are the gardens secateurs, once shelter belt trees have lost their leaves they sweep in unopposed, knocking flat and scorching brown, deciding when the garden is finished for the year.
Cold frames though are full of new life, cell trays of seedlings sown in late summer, a few are perennials for the garden but most are wildflowers, top up plants for the newly reinstated meadow. Most are easy, some like Ox-eye and Yarrow only have to be shown compost, once sown growing as thick as grass. Others are more tardy, Wood Cranesbill are taking their time, some appeared within days, others only now pushing through, weeks after sowing. Devils Bit Scabious are yet to show, a favourite, as the year warms and the days lengthen fingers are crossed that one morning as cold frames are opened up the trays they are sown in will be found to be dusted green with new seedlings.
Birds are busy on the feeders. Finches are counted by the dozen. On a front garden Rowan Greenfinch and Goldfinch are vying for feeder space with House Sparrows and ever squabbling Starlings. Chaffinches take the less stressful route, searching the ground beneath shelter belt trees in the company of Collared Doves and Blackbirds for bird seed mix cast daily among the leaf litter.
Fieldfares and Redwings are being seen again, absent for the past few weeks, the Redwings joining the Chaffinches and Doves amongst the leaf litter, the Fieldfares are seen on cliff tops, groups of ten and twenty searching rough pasture and wind scoured coastal heath, soon we’ll see hundreds. Waxwings may be seen again, autumn visitors from Scandinavia who like the Redwings and Fieldfares will soon be heading back North to breed where summers are even shorter than ours.
A garden in Orkney 