Making Hay

It's always the smells that get you when a spring day comes at last, and you realise how barren winter is in the olfactory department. Yesterday in the warm sun the scents were of life beginning to burst through the ground and the hard coverings of the trees and hedges. Warmed grass, fresh buds, earth stirred up by new growth pushing its way to the light, all combined to disturb the synapses and intoxicate the senses. And it wasn't all a stimulation of the nose: birdsong was intense, the blackbirds as always most active towards the evening, singing their hearts out in the trees and on the rooftops. .As we walked around the edges of fields already ankle-high with winter wheat the sound of larks in ecstasy filled the air. At first you don't notice the music, so high and constant it is, but it gradually entered my consciousness and then could not be ignored. Sebastian Barry in a rare moment of beauty in the disappointing The Temporary Gentleman describes it thus: "A lark, a single bird with her dowdy plumage, burst up from her cup of sand just in front of me and like a needle flashing in my mother's hand of old made a long stitch between earth and heaven, with a joyousness that rent my heart."

We were out all day, Hugo and me. As I sat on my kneelers labouring to remove the weeds around the pond he stretched out in the summerhouse in a pool of sunshine and slept. Every now and then he came out to watch me, and then he lay on the grass beside me and stretched and rolled before nodding off again. Anything I leave on the grass becomes his bed, however small and inadequate. Yesterday it was my scarf flung from my neck as I heated up, and the boy curled himself around it, his big body making little contact with the wool. I'm making progress though it's slow work. But enjoyable too, and if I wake in the night I'm eager for morning to come so that I can start again. One of my kneelers, left out overnight, had sharp teethmarks in it where something had had a ferocious chew. My visitor on Sunday told me it would have been rats that ate the tulip bulbs in my pots, tossing the earth out to get at the succulent tips. And looking at these teethmarks I could only agree that she must be right. Next year I'll thwart them with wire netting, but it's too late for this year. I'll be surprised if I have a single tulip from the 50 or so that have flourished for three springs. That's gardening: elation and despair living side by side. That's life.