MARCH - "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..."

"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring -

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. - Have, get, before it cloy,

Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sun's rays over Stempster House

Last Saturday I bought some rhubarb for planting. We already have rhubarb. The thing is that I never think the rhubarb we harvest these days tastes quite like the rhubarb I tasted when I was young - so I keep getting new bits and hoping!

I'm not sure about forcing it. I've tried it before but was unimpressed. The problem with forcing it is that I can't harvest it again for a whole year. Rhubarb seemed to be the go-to plant when nothing else was ready so it seems strange that it shouldn't be harvested after March.

There's a special sweetness about the bottom of those early stems which makes the space taken up by the rhubarb entirely worthwhile. Problem there is that the rest of the stems are not nearly as sweet and require copious quantities of sugar to sweeten!

Seals on the River Thurso - taken March 29th, when Ginny and Judith went seal-spotting.

Amongst the March flowers, of course I love the happy daffodils, but the diminutive lungwort is way up there with other favourites too. The stunningly pretty leaves, as they develop, continue to add interest to the border well into the summer months.The bees love the lungwort's flowers and they are funnel-shaped just for them!! The golden crocus are flowering in the back garden now - at the end of March - and they are so bright that it seems someone switched on a light in the little yellow border. The tiny iris are over but they're being replaced by the grape hyacinths (muscari). The muscari are not quite open yet but I can see the blue wrapped up inside and ready to decorate the entrance from the yard. The flowering currant hedge on the hillside is blushing pinker and pinker. It's such a delicate flower that I wonder how it survives the winds. I remember a hedge of flowering currant and forsythia, planted alternately, when I was a child growing up in Epworth.

Stempster daffydowndillies taken today 30th March

The garden here is a magnificent muddle. Lots of unexpected things grow and those we'd planned for don't always!

I inherited a love of gardens and gardening from both sides of my family and my children have inherited it from me. When Keith and I had been married just a few months, we moved from a flat into our first house. Expecting him to have the same feelings for growing things as I do, I set him to dig. Every time I looked out of the window, he'd be chatting with someone. Progress with our new garden was limited. Admittedly the soil wasn't great but I felt we should be looking for some development! Eventually I gardened it myself and, although we were able to host lots of happy survivors, nobody would have called it planned. It would be fair to say that all of our gardens have been this way. A series of happy accidents!

I did come to the realisation, after a while, that Keith was interested in growing specimens. The native plants and trees were not nearly as exciting for him!!! One result of this is the Ginkgo we have settling in beneath the high wall to the west of our present garden. We planted one in our first garden, as one of Keith's specimens, and he was sorry to leave it behind when we moved to Orkney, so we now have one doing its best for him in Caithness. Who knows, one day it may be a magnificent specimen!

It's almost the end of March and this morning we had snow. It didn't settle but it was quite definitely snow. For my part I'm longing to spend time gardening without being so muffled up that I can't move comfortably. There's still someone inside me with ridiculously high expectations but common sense must prevail and I am now obliged to allow myself longer to complete the necessary tasks in the garden - before luxuriating in the fun stuff - like poking fat nasturtium seeds into little crevices of soil and sprinkling forget-me-nots in places I'm certain to forget - but which will delight me even more when they flower because of the forgetting.

Moon taken on 15th March - the ides!

Every little thing is changing. The birds are swapping over - chiffchaffs are arriving with other warblers while fieldfares and redwings are leaving us. The trees have buds, blossoms, even tiny green leaves on some. The geese are moving in larger flocks and swans are on the move too. Hedgehogs are peeping out from behind Winter and are ready to snuffle through undergrowth for the next six months or so. I keep checking the pond for frogspawn - nothing yet - I think maybe it needs to be a degree or two warmer. But the long light days are coming. When I wake in the morning I can see the effect of the lightening sky on the blind. The sky gets lighter very quickly now and the birds are the first to share it with me. Their song just gets sweeter and sweeter every morning - especially now the summer migrants are beginning to set up shop! As soon as I step outside the kitchen door, at any time of day just now, I hear the liquid call of curlews and the piping of the skylarks. They live in harmony in the fields around us.

Home playing hide and seek on a sunny March morning

The twenty fifth of this month was the anniversary of moving to Orkney. It was a stormy day thirty eight years ago. I had been told there were no trees in Orkney and, back then, there weren't many but people have researched and funded the planting of trees on the windswept archipelago since then. Now there are trees there - but not in huge numbers. To be honest I wasn't dismayed with the treeless skyline. I'd come north from the Isle of Axholme where our main feature was the fenland landscape. We had some trees but the huge skyscapes were punctuated with them rather than broken up by forests or plantations. However, there had been woods and a forest in the Isle - at the time the Romans came to Britain. The Romans had destroyed forests on the continent due to the refuge they had been giving to those who opposed them. It's believed they did the same to the Isle Forest. They did this by burning. The ones they couldn't burn were chopped down - but not with a chainsaw!! What happened next is of interest too. The fallen trees altered the water courses, filling up the lower lying land. As a result, this became marshy - a swamp until Vermuyden drained the area. When the remains of the trees were excavated they proved to have been giants amongst trees. Colossuses!

Alder catkins earlier in March

Our trees here at Stempster not only provide nesting sites for the birds, but also they offer sustenance  - for the woodpecker and the treecreeper to name but two. The treecreeper seems to like the sitka spruce and is difficult to spot when it's feeding there as it has been recently. Ginny spotted the body of a sparrowhawk at the edge of the wood - always sad to see. However, on the same day she watched a peregrine hunched above Jess, the cocker spaniel, watching her and probably wondering what its chances were! Peregrines have come back in recent years - after their persecution during World War Two when they were shot in an effort to protect carrier pigeons.

A bird which is not so interested in trees is the short-eared owl and we're thrilled to find a pair has taken to regularly hunting around our hill. This year has so far brought a number of larger birds to our area. I can't always be sure what they are. There are two reasons really

1) my eyesight isn't what it once was!

2) I've never been good at differentiating between the big birds - well it isn't all big birds - it's mostly the killers! I have resented them, if truth be told, because they make me so sad when they carry away the smaller ones. I'm constantly reminded that they too have to eat - but I'd like to know what's wrong with the scraps I put out!

The tail of the kite is a give-away and it's easy to spot as it glides and dances in the sky - amazingly able for a bird of its size. I saw one on the way down to the Black Isle this month, near the Dornoch Firth. The gorse, by the way, is absolutely stunning from Caithness to the Black Isle. It never ceases to delight me in springtime.

Buzzards too are aerial acrobats and they can be spotted all around us at present looking for casualties at lambing time. I often see them circling the fields between us and the windfarm and, one day last week, I thought I spotted one on its own - they seem to go around in small groups just now - but a closer look told me it may well have been an osprey. I've seen ospreys a few times now and I would have expected it to have been flying a little higher but everything else pointed to this magnificent bird - especially as it was following the course of the burn and heading down towards the river where people fish for salmon.

Going down towards the river, early March

Good Friday was a bright day here in Northern Scotland. I remember some very wintry Good Fridays and so I'm glad of the upturn in our weather - at least for a while!

When I was a little girl it always seemed to be sunny at Eastertide. I'm sure it can't possibly have been sunny every Easter - but that's how I remember it! The fact remains, sun or no sun, that the year has turned. We're leaving behind Nature's sleeping time and emerging, with hope, into the bewitching glory that is springtime. With some keen frosts this week, the birds are still hungry in the early mornings but it won't be too long before we see the little ones being shown how to fend for themselves.

Flowering currant hedge on the hill

The fields are filling up with lambs now. Some are getting quite big. Is there anything more joyful to watch than a group of lambs playing together - skipping, bouncing and teasing each other as their weary mums look on? Judith and Clemency saw the first lambs near Weydale on 5th March. Now, not a month later, the tiny little things have grown in size and confidence. Caithness is fairly teeming with them!

There are lots of hares having fun too - but I suspect they're the grown-ups with an agenda!

Is it a gonk? Bottoms up!!!

The long cold winter nights are slipping away and new life is everywhere. The garden becomes an extension of the house. The dark waiting time is over. Tomorrow is Easter Day. Hallelujah!

Happy Easter - may its optimism bring you happiness.

No, I’m not afraid: after a year

Of breathing these prison nights

I will survive into the sadness

To name which I escape.

The cockerel will weep freedom for me

And here- knee-deep in mire-

My gardens shed their water

And the northern air blows in draughts.

And how am I to carry to an alien planet

What are almost tears, as though towards home…

It isn’t true, I am afraid, my darling!

But make it look as though you haven't noticed.

No, I'm Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya

The above poem was written by a woman who was imprisoned in the Soviet labour camp at Barashevo. She was imprisoned for her views. She was treated cruelly for three years but worldwide campaigns on her behalf resulted in her release.  She came, with her husband, to Britain in December 1986. May Britain always be a haven for the persecuted.