welsh hills again

The end of March.  The clocks have gone forward  Surely, surely it must be spring. "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb."  I have always loved that saying but this year and last it has not proved true.  Last year here in North Wales March went out with the cold savagery of a snow tiger.  We had ten foot high snow drifts and many farmers lost sheep and lambs in staggering numbers to the devastating spring snowstorms which come only once in a generation.  This year the lamblike part of March was in the first part of the month with sunshine, warm temperatures and gentle breezes which made the daffodils open in a great yellow rush down the hill under the fruit trees. I love these little Tenby daffodils, narcissus obvallaris,  and they are naturalising busily now.  They are small in scale with a jaunty, upright stance, perhaps less graceful than the pseudonarcissus which were Wordworth's daffodils but gloriously happy somehow. These are pseudonarcis

Last year we had a precious few days away in the Outer Hebrides.  I had wanted to go for years.  We hired a campervan and drove and ferried and kept on driving to the edge of the world. It was a special snatched few days of sun and wind and the simple, slightly uncomfortable but ultimately calming life that is life in a van, away from home, with nothing to do but look and listen and walk and read and eat.  I have almost lost it now, under the huge tides of this winter with my mother's death and my father's illness and the care of my father in law and the flood of need.  Almost but not quite. While we were away I bought some wool from the Hebridean Woolshed , handspun fine Merino in the colours of the seas around South Uist. Here it is far away from home on my kitchen table in Wales.  I was going to make a cowl with it but after a couple of false starts I decided I wanted to have a go at doing something of my own, not a pattern or a design made by someone else but s

Encouraged by Lucy from Loose and Leafy I am joining in with a group of people following a tree for a year. Now I have to be honest and admit that I started this last year but somehow lost interest quite quickly. Shameful I know.  Last year's tree was a horse chestnut and while it excited me mightily in spring, it then spent a lot of time in the summer looking pretty much the same.  I suspect this assessment is more to do with my failing to look closely enough at what was going on than with any lack on the part of the tree. This year I wandered about looking at trees and waiting for one to choose me.  I love the really big trees by the house. I considered both of these, the sycamore by the drive and the yew by the house.  Somehow they were just too big.  I felt I was not up to the challenge of doing them justice and also they are so damn high.  There would be worlds of life up there that I wouldn't know anything about, however carefully I photographed them every month f