Just for the record, for some future date when I flick back through my blog in search of a picture and stumble across this entry, this has been the coldest spring in my lifetime. A few patches of snow still nestle on the north side of the polytunnels where they slid off two weeks ago. The daytime temperatures have barely scraped above 5C and at night what little heat there has been is quickly swept away as the sun sinks. It has been cold enough at night to freeze the chickens’ water trough solid every morning for two months.

As the cold spell has lengthened, both the garden and I have entered a state of patient acceptance. Neither of us are fooled by the occasional hour or two of caressing sunshine. We will not offer up a tender shoot or delicate blossom to its treachery. We are waiting. Waiting for the weather vane  on the tea room roof to turn to the west, waiting for the warming, wet westerlies on which our spring depends.

With the garden trapped in still life between winter and spring, the usual runaway unfurling of the garden is taking place in slow motion. The snowdrops that emerged in February are still merrily swinging away, revelling in the cold. Days go by and a newly unfurled leaf holds its pose, poised. In earlier years I have rushed to get my camera as the light catches a bud just so, knowing that the moment will be fleeting. Not this year. I can take my time, examine an emerging shoot for as long as I please, leave it two days – a week. Spring is taking its time and so can I.

For all my alleged high work rate and busy-ness, I am a ponderer at heart. And this slow spring invites me to ponder at length, to gaze at the patterns on an emerging Eremerus shoot, or watch my hand turn red as the sun glows through a Rheum palmatum leaf.  There is time to crouch low in the border, wondering at a Peucedanum shoot which has punched its way through the soil and stopped, its ruby-hued, frondy palm upturned as if craving alms of the sun (a borrowed description, yes, perhaps my favourite of all time).

And then, when the wind chills my fingers past the point of function, there is always the greenhouse, my chin almost on the bench, eyes focusing in and out, scanning the trays for the first tell-tale sign of the surface lifting slightly as a new seedling arches its way into the light.

April, come she will. And when she finally arrives, there’ll be no time for seed-gazing. Or for spotting aphids on Orlaya seedlings through a close-up camera lens and picking them off by hand. It’s hard to find joy in this long, slow, cold spring but in a few weeks time when all is bustle and rush I may just look back on it with genuine affection.

April 7, 2013