Spring has Sprung!

After our long, cold and miserable winter, it's such a joy to see the season change into a time of blue skies, birdsong, sunshine, buds bursting into blossom and leaf, and colourful flowers appearing all around us. The narcissi above and forget-me-nots below are in our village library garden, a lovely surprise beyond the black tarmac carpark there.

The akebia on the side fence by our front door is in flower, it's pretty chocolate-maroon flowers in shy, subtle clumps contrasting well with the rich green leaves it sports.

These snowflakes are blooming away in the front garden, around the base of the deep secret rosebush, like something from the flower fairy books of my childhood.

Two more pictures of the akebia, because I love it. It looks so exotic.

Of course, spring would not be complete without bluebells. There used to be a lot of them in my garden when we moved here but they are few and far between now, sadly.

My purple Snakeshead Fritillary seems to have gone the way of most of the bluebells but the white one is looking gorgeous. I think some new bulbs would be a good idea when the time comes, because it's another favourite of mine.

Why do weeds grow so much better than anything else? You can see that the dandelions are flourishing! Will have to get to work on those!

Bindweed is growing faster than anything else at the moment - it needs a daily patrol to pull out the new shoots and every year it proves a losing battle - it would be great if this year was the exception to the rule!

Signs of Spring and Sun

 

The tadpoles have hatched! These are from the first lot of spawn - more appeared in the pond after the bitter cold spell we had at the end of February, which is still there, plumply globular with the little tadpoles slowly developing tails. But these babies are the ones that were under ice a couple of weeks ago. Nature surely is wonderful.

It is very hard to photograph tadpoles in our garden pond: if I used no flash, they got obscured by my reflection and, if I did, by the flash flare reflection. However, by aiming off centre, and cropping, I had some success.

 

The plumbago has started flowering under the walnut tree, a welcome splash of warm, purply blue.

 

The sun has been making half-hearted attempts to shine out from behind the clouds above the maple tree, which made a surprisingly dramatic sky for this photo and encouraged me to hang out washing on the line. The puddles have dried up, too.