Spring Fever

This week I turned 61 and my son Nick was 22. I celebrated by staying in bed until 2 pm. He's driven for three hours to Hereford to take 12 friends out for an Indian meal.

Meanwhile in Miller Way it's been a splendid week all round. Today's sunny weather has topped it all off nicely but now the full "super-moon" is shining through the pine tree into my kitchen. (I took the photo from the back garden.) It's the closest that the moon has come to us on Earth for a long time, and it looks so huge tonight.

These clear nights keep bringing frosts but daytime temperatures climb to over 13 C. This triggers a stampede at the local garden centre and you can hear the tills ringing from our house. We are tempted to pop down there ourselves, but there is so much spade-work to do first.

So Hanna and I spent the day in the garden, making up for months of neglect and storm damage (to the garden, not us).

The biggest task has been to lay the hedge at the bottom of the garden. This has to be done before the buds burst; ideally before the sap starts rising. In the countryside the objective would be to create a stock-proof hedge out of a row of bushes or trees. As bushes age, they get leggy because all the growth is at the top. To rejuvenatethem and to get growth near the ground, the trick is to cut the trunk most of the way through, then topple the trimmed bush and bind it into a hedge. To be honest, there's a lot more to it than that but you can get an idea from the photos. Hopefully, the result this year will be a dense hedge about 4 feet high.

We do a lot of hedge-laying where I work, but

usually using hawthorn or blackthorn bushes. My garden hedge is composed of hazel and field maple, but I've under planted a few hawthorns and bound in some bramble and honeysuckle to hold it all together.

Where we live in Brampton there are still several nurseries growing hedge plants. Up until quite recently the whole village and the surrounding hamlets engaged themselves in growing thorn bushes for hedging as part of the industrialisation of agriculture. The period of enclosure was especially prolonged and active in the new, reclaimed, flat landscapes of East Anglia and Brampton provided hedge plants for the East Midlands as well.

For the sake of privacy I have repaired our larch-lap fences, but I hope to be able to take them down in a year's time when the hedge will be thicker.

Meanwhile we can watch the rhubarb grow and witness the swelling of each bud on our fruit trees. Our neighbours already have gardens that look like 1950s chocolate box lids, with enough pink blossom to be visible from space!

Whenever I see a profusion of cherry blossom it reminds me of Japan. The blossom is so exuberant, so over the top, that it has to make you smile. I hope that the trees are blossoming there now and spreading a little hope. Like birdsong, it is sign of better things to come.