Garden of early delights puts a spring in my step

IT’S still a mess of leaves and dead stalks but the snowdrops are pushing up their little heads in the front garden.

I didn’t plant them but they come up years after year, a row on each side of the footpath through the gate.

This year, they’re tiny, hardly big enough to be seen. Maybe I should have shifted last year’s clippings but I thought they’d keep the soil warm

Either that, or I was too lazy to bag it and persuade Mrs R to take it to the council dump. Not during pandemic, mate. Snowdrops are not really the first sign of spring, only a reminder that not even General Winter can put nature off.

No, that description of changing seasons properly belongs to the heather in the back garden – and that’s starting to blossom, too. There are three separate bushes but so intermingled it’s impossible to tell them apart until they flower.

The white, at the far end, comes first. It’s just beginning to bloom, or sprout, or whatever heather does. The purple in the middle is the last.

The magnolia we brought from the farm cottage in Cowling is very much in bud and it won’t be long before a few daffodils and bluebells make their appearance. We’re fortunate to have made it through another winter – so far – when so many have succumbed to Covid.

Relief is mixed with annoyance that the so-called Prime Minister takes credit for levelling-off the infection rate. He wouldn’t have got Plan B through Parliament without the backing of Labour MPs.

The nation’s health is now determined by right-wing nutcases who hold Boris Johnson’s future in their grubby hands.

Fortunately, life goes on in the garden. They can’t interfere with that.