welsh hills again

Every year I channel my inner nerd and go out and count my snowdrops.  When we came here in 2005 there was a sprinkling of snowdrops along one side of the drive.  They took me by surprise when they came up in January 2006 when I was recovering from a serious illness and they were the first flowers this garden offered me, having moved into a cold and empty November garden.  Regrettably I had no premonition that I would get a bit obsessive about snowdrops so I have no idea how many there were.  I would guess at about a hundred.  In 2007 and 2008 I planted five hundred more in the green, mainly the common single snowdrop, galanthus nivalis, with a small amount of common doubles.  I am not a serious snowdrop fancier, a real galanthophile.  I do not collect rare varieties and shiver on my knees in the great snowdrop gardens like Cambo Estate  and Hodsock Priory .  I have not spent hundreds on a single bulb of great rarity.  I am not totally i...

In April 2012 I shall have been writing my blog for five years.  Blogging is just built into the fabric of my life now.  If I haven't blogged for a few days I begin to feel a bit itchy, not quite guilty but certainly aware that there is something due, a bit like when you know you need to phone a friend and haven't got round to it. Five years of writing means you can look back.  Mostly I look back at the garden and the end of month view posts.  But you can also look back at what you were doing and how you were feeling at the same time last year, and the year before and the year before that.  I have been looking back today and the pattern is clear as day: in February I get grumpy. It is the lack of light and warmth I think.  It hasn't been a hard winter up here in North Wales so far but it still seems a long time since it was light in the evening and warm enough to sit outside.  I have had enough of a sky like a dustbin lid and enough of mud and murk...