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.

 

 When I see Winter Aconites and Snowdrops I'm always cheered by their early flowers. They promise that spring is on the way. I saw these when I was out walking yesterday. They are particularly early this year. 

 

 

 There has been a lot of rain. I've crossed this low bridge into the village of Charlton in Hertfordshire many times over the years. Today it had become a ford.

 

 The River Hiz rises the other side of the village where bubbling springs feed from wet woods into a large millpond. When the water is this high it's a sure sign of a wet winter, particularly in recent decades after a pumping station was built nearby. There are about two hundred chalk streams in the world. Most are in southern England and the Hiz is one of them.

And it really is a very wet winter when the water floods from the back end of the woods into the fields beyond. 

 

 "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" as Dylan Thomas once put it. Hellebore foetidus starts to bloom very early in the year, sometimes even before Christmas. Strange to say it is of the Buttercup family Ranunculaceae.

 

 Going potty. Winter is a good time to do jobs like sorting through the pots. Plastic is actually a good and durable material for something that's intended to be used over and over again. It's unfortunate that our epoch will be represented in the fossil record by a layer of plastic from objects that were mostly used once then thrown away.

 

Pretty basic but functional!

 

  A light fall of snow overnight (the first I've seen this winter). It's been a relatively mild winter in Southern England albeit damp. I welcome cold winters. It's part of the life cycle of nature in the northern hemisphere.

 A period of dormancy in plants is the precursor to the "green fuse" being lit in spring. Periods of chilling are needed both to enter and emerge from dormancy, a process sometimes referred to as vernalisation.  

 

 About this time last year I stood at the mouth of the River Lea where it meets the Thames at Bow Creek (above). I hatched the idea of using the Lee Valley Walk to follow the course of the river into Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire back to its source in the Chiltern Hills (Lee and Lea are alternate spellings). I intended to break it up into several stages as a project to be completed during 2020.

 Well, it didn't turn out like that. As John Lennon once put it: "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans". Maybe this year...

 

  The compost bin I made last year out of salvaged joists is also a good sawhorse for cutting more of the timbers. I'm making a couple of work benches to go in the greenhouse. A Robin and a Thrush kept a close watch for titbits as I disturbed the wood pile- grubs, spiders, worms etc.

 

  Reality can be pretty strange sometimes. As I stepped out this morning I heard the pitter patter of splashy raindrops. I saw the slabs on the patio were getting wet. Then I did a double take.

 The big holly tree next door looms overhead. When it rains there is a dry spot under its branches. Now that dry spot was splattered with wet and the exposed area of the patio was dry! I could only conclude that it was raining under the tree but not out of the sky!

 Then my befuddled brain figured out was going on. Moisture had frozen overnight on the glossy holly leaves. As the morning temperature rose above zero the frozen water was dripping down. At that point I realised I could hear a gentle crackling sound from the whole tree which was the leaves thawing out.

 Simple enough when I understood it but for a few moments reality made no sense at all.

 

 I came across these Snowdrop bulbs coming into growth even though I forgot to plant them last autumn. A bulb is a storage organ so already has "food" for the growing season. I potted them up and hopefully they will settle in, flower and begin storing sustenance for the following year.

 NB I have noted before that Snowdrops should be planted when freshly lifted because they do not like to dry out. That is generally true but these are Galanthus elwesii whose natural habitat is the Taurus mountains in Turkey. This species is adapted to drying out in the parched summers there which no doubt explains why they are going strong despite several months in a paper bag.

 

 Do plants think? "The dynamics of plant nutation" is an intriguing piece of research published in the journal Scientific Reports. It posits that climbing beans show intent in seeking out structures to climb rather than merely growing until they happen to come into contact with them.

 I believe that plants are sentient though it seems many botanists disagree. Of course it is not the sentience that humans possess so it's not helpful to drift into the realms of anthropomorphism. None the less the myriad of infinitely subtle ways that plants sense and interact with their surroundings both above and below ground seems to me to be a form of consciousness.  

 

 The thermometer is on zero but it's nice to see some shards of winter sunshine illuminating bare branches. Sleet and snow predicted tomorrow!

 

 

A bit of psychedelia for a grey day- a field near the Pegsdon Hills last summer. 

 

 New Year's Day. Made an enclosure for collecting leaves to produce leafmould (sometimes called leaf mold!). I say "made"- four bamboo canes and some netting. A year is sufficient for a nicely decomposed mulch/soil improver, two years for some lovely crumbly stuff to mix with loam and compost for a potting mix. Who knows what the future holds but at least there will be leafmould.