Spring is in the air. Early February is a bit soon perhaps but there is a definite freshness on the breeze which wakes the senses. And the days are getting longer; twilight is a good hour later than the depths of mid-winter. 

 

 You need a lot of space for a bamboo grove. This one is in Martin Crawford's two acre forest garden at Dartington Hall, Devon. Bamboos play an important part in his design both for edible shoots and for cane production. Some stems are the size of scaffold poles; indeed bamboo has long been used for that purpose in Asia. 

 In a domestic garden they are a somewhat trickier proposition. Broadly speaking bamboos are either 'clumpers' or 'runners'. My father has planted both kinds over the years and it is a fairly large garden so they don't look out of place. The clumpers have slowly increased and provide a good source of tall canes to use as bean poles on the allotment. Then again he also planted one of the Sasa species which is most definitely a runner to the extent that it would advance on the whole garden if left unattended.

 I cut the entire swathe of it right down to the ground today which will provide enough short sticks to last a decade or two...

 

 This grand Oak grows in the garden of my ancestral home in Hertfordshire, by which I mean the house I grew up in. In fact it was only a sapling when I was only a sapling. I spent several enchanted minutes looking up at it last night.

 I heard an owl screeching and on one of its branches I saw the owl silhouetted against the night sky (too dark to take a photo unfortunately so the one above was taken this afternoon). That was a thrilling moment because there have always been owls in and around this garden despite being in the middle of a largish town. As a child my bedroom window looked out onto the garden and I vividly recall hearing them hooting in the darkness. But I've never seen one out there until last night!

 This was a solitary screecher but I still hear the distinctive 'too-wit too-woo' some nights as I have done for decades. It was only more recently I learned this is the cry of the Tawny Owl, in fact two of them. The female Tawny Owl calls 'too-wit' and the male responds 'too-woo'.

 

 The snow has melted now but it was good to see the rolling Pegsdon Hills under snow on Monday. A familiar place transformed into somewhere else.

 

 

Walked over the Pegsdon Hills which were rather more alpine than the last time I was here.

 

 

 The landscape of the hollows looked strangely lunar. Powdery snow covered the numerous dome-like anthills created by Yellow Meadow Ants. These mounds are a vital part of the ecology of chalk grasslands.

 Which reminds me I have long thought of studying the flora and fauna of the Pegsdon Hills over the course of a year. I'll try to visit them about once a month during the year ahead.  

 

Let it snow.

 

 The hedgerows are bare but in the leaf litter below something stirs... 

 

 The leaves of Lords and Ladies (Arum maculatum) are unfurling.