Spring has arrived, despite heavy frost this morning.  The daffodils are blooming along the drive, one violet has emerged, and the snowdrops are almost finished.  Colour is coming back to the land, with leaves emerging and some early flowers, almost all yellow or white, coming into bloom.

This winter has been one of the coldest, snowiest and most beautiful for years.  The fell tops were clean and white, with blue skies behind them.  For weeks the ground was white and hard with either frost or snow, the beck was white with ice, and the ice on the pond was inches thick and cracked in a dramatic fashion after a slight thaw, ice that could bear a person's weight.  The skies were big and bright and thick with stars.  Outside the farm front door the view of them is impeded by the lights which come on when they sense movement, but standing still in the car park across the beck, the view of the Milky Way is spectacular, banding right across the dark sky, and the few generally recognisable constellations march across the heavens as they always have.  Few people in England can now see this thrilling sight at night, because of light pollution in more heavily populated areas, and that sense of how small we are in the universe must be more difficult to come by when you cannot see the cosmos spread out above you, as people have since the earliest of times.

A couple of hares were playing in the back garden recently.  Apparently the brown hare is growing in numbers in many areas now because of better farming practices and more congenial environments.  They are attractive creatures with powerful muscles and great speed.  They looked like two brothers, teasing and bantering with each other right across the field, unaware of any human observer.  The badgers are making their presence felt with pawings and rootings in the earth around their sett.  There is a new large hole in the very top of the woodland, and it may be that they have moved house, or perhaps a new colony has been established.  Certainly the markings are very close to the old sett, so it looks like they are still in residence there.  And the deer are leaving prints in the mud down the path to the beck from one side of the new woodland to the other.  One Saturday morning there was one in the back field, her auburn colouring looking so like a fox that for a moment it was deceiving.  Then her size gave her away.  So unafraid of humans is she that when chased away she only goes into the next field, constantly looking back to see if no one will now disturb her back where she was in the first place.  And after a decent interval, back she goes, grazing in a field where the grass must be for some reason superior to that in the field next door.

Now all the trees are budding, and the hawthorns are already green in the hedges, so it is clear Spring is here. A couple of days have been as warm as summer, and as sunny.  No possibility of ice now on the pond water and puddles.  The new fruit garden is leafing up nicely, with the possibilities of a fruit harvest later in the year, now the bushes and trees are becoming established.  Last year, the latest fruit was the autumn raspberries, which could still be picked in November.  But every year for the next few will be a new experience in the fruit garden, while plantings grow and develop and come into fruiting.

The arboretum trees are a slower event.  The trees there will take many years to reach maturity, but then will stay put for a century or more, if all goes well.  It is good to think something has been done that will outlast the people that did it and give pleasure to future generations.