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This is the new culinary patch, with chive flowers going over and the Greek oregano completely overwhelming the lemon thyme.

The knot garden is beginning to show its potential a bit more. The santolina to the right and back has bushed up enormously and the blue hyssop is almost there. The southernwood and rosemary are more mixed – some of the plants have done really well, and others are somewhat slower. In the four panels are clary sage in front, just beginning to show bracts in a very exciting purple, ammi majus at the backwhich has flower buds but no colour yet, carthamus (safflower) to the right and a mix of marigold and poppy to the left. Actually it was supposed to be just marigolds, sowed quite densely, I thought, but germination was erratic and the poppies arrived by themselves. I can never bring myself to get rid of poppies.

This is the chamomile lawn with the first flowerbuds just showing. You can also see plants of violet, foxgloves, feverfew, angelica and horehound. Some of them were deliberate!And this is the stock bed with costmary, carnation, a lovely lavender stoechas (I think it is Madrid blue) and hyssop. Beyond it is the pond, surrounded by meadowsweet and yellow flag. It is all getting out of control, needs serious weeding and cutting back, but I love it at this time of year. It is so lush and whole-hearted in its determination to take over!

All the birds are fledged now, except the chicks in the black-backed gull colony, and the swallows and housemartins. I’m not sure how the latter will get on, as they tend to get stolen by the gull parents. This means there isn’t quite the birdsong there was a few eeks back, except for the wrens, who are still singing their hearts out – and the curlew I heard last week. Usually they are out on Flanders Moss by now, but there was one heading downstream as I was hanging out the washing. It was wonderful!

We have been to Scarborough with all our family, four children, and two grand-daughters – it was hard work, but fun. We had a lovely house with enough space for everyone to spread out, and we had great weather – most of the time!

But now we are back and my truanting has caught me out. Everything is lush and overgrown and needs dead-heading, cutting back, pruning, potting on, propagating or harvesting.

Some things haven’t done too badly. The chamomile lawn is bulking up nicelyand the cold frame looks rather good

and I took three cuttings from the Atlas Mountain mint, which have rooted very quickly

But there’s a whole heap of work waiting for me. I have been taking cuttings and drying herbs as they come into flower, and making a rose pot pourri, but I also took a dander up to the black Isle to see the wonderful herb nursery at Poyntzfield. It’s a wonderful place, full of bees and butterflies and an enormous variety of herbs, medicinal, culinary, aromatic, all grown by biodynamic methods.

I succumbed, of course I did. And now I have a calamus (a fragrant rush) a roman wormwood and a genuine Florentine orris plant to look after as well! It’s a good job the weather is so benign – I’m going to need it!

It’s getting light in the morning now when I leave the house, and the birds are busier each day. Robins and blackbirds are always singing, but great tits, sparrows, starlings crows and magpies are all adding to the livelier atmosphere, and this morning there was a thrush. So spring has started. There’s a lot of bird movement later in the day too. It’s at this time of year I see most of the dunnocks wrens and goldfinches (though I certainly hear the wrens and dunnocks come May – for small birds they can be really rowdy). I heard the first curlews yesterday when I was gardening, and the geese are gathering together, though not really going north yet.

But the big feature of the mornings just now are the gulls. Not the black-headed ones, they’ve been here all along, and though there’s an awful lot of them their noise is nothing special. And it’s not the black-backed gulls which come back in the summer to nest on the warehouse roof. They have an awful raucous witchy screaming call, which I could do without. These are herring gulls, which haven’t been too common round here up till now. Perhaps it’s the stae of the tide, perhaps there’s more food along the river bank, but suddenly the morning sky is full of this lovely wild romantic call, the sound they put over Sleepy Lagoon at the end of Desert Island Discs, the sound that Tolkien describes as ‘waking the sea-longing’ in the hearts of the Elves. Herring gulls are not the easiest of neighbours. They are big, and fearless and hungry. These are the gulls that will have your fish supper out of the paper before you can sit down to eat it, that terrify children in school-yards by mobbing them till they drop their play-pieces. But they are also on the Red List of endangered species, and in the moning light, they sound wonderful.

You can hear their call on the RSPB web-site, here:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/h/herringgull/index.aspx

Garden work is only just beginning, but I’ve been potting on plants of winter savory and mint, cutting back dead foliage on southernwood, costmary and tarragon – all showing signs of new growth, and moving established cuttings out into the cold frame to harden off before I plant them out. Today I picked parsley chervil chives and fennel to put in fish cakes, so I feel that the year of the herbs is really taking off!

It’s the first really cold weather this week, and there are very few leaves left on the trees. From my window I can see the dark slopes of the distant hills, the magpies in the orchard , and even – if I lean out sideways, the snow on the Trossachs. It’s a bare and austere outlook, but it has a certain clarity and a sense of openness and distance.

Which isn’t too inappropriate for the place I am in just now. Life has changed a lot over the last couple of years. One minute we had all our children flown the nest and establishing themselves elsewhere. Now two of them are very close, and we are heavily involved in their lives. Both my husband and I have reached significant ages, and we are thinking of retirement. Some of us have been ill, and some of us are not getting better any time soon. The way we have been living isn’t going to work for us much longer. A lot of illusions have falllen away in the last twelve moths. A lot of hopes and ambitions have had to be let go.

It sounds like a bad time, and I won’t pretend it hasn’t had its moments! But it hasn’t been all darkness and disappointment. I have discovered some tremendous gifts and richness in my life, just waiting for me to pay attention. It’s been a time of pruning back, but also greater fruitfulness, and it has brought a lot of unexpected comfort and reassurance, in the closeness of family relationships, the making of new friendships, the deepening of old ones,, and even, occasionally and most unexpectedly, in the helpfulness of institutions. I have a new clarity about what is important in my life, in my writing, and in my home environment.

I expect that we will have to leave this house where we have lived for over thirty years. I don’t expect to be gardening the way I do here for much longer. But I do expect to be writing, readng, blogging and thinking even more when other activities lessen. Winter may be dark and bare but it’s a great time for vision, and for renewal!

This photo was taken from Abbey Craig, the place from where Wallace’s army looked down at the English army crossing Stirling Bridge. I was looking south towards our village rather than west.

It’s a while since I last posted, and I’m only just getting the hang of this wordpress lark. I’ve begun adding links to other blogs, and I’ll be adding more as I go.

I’ve been out and about lately, looking after family – there’s a new grand-daughter to be excited about, and many poetry and geopoetical things brewing. I’ve been reviewing a bit lately, and shortly there will be several more – mostly on here, but in other places too. But this week I’ll be going with my friend Barbara to Geraldine Green’s Write to Roam workshop Geraldine is someone I first encountered via the Earthlines website, and is a poet and thinker with whom I feel a great connection.

I’m taking a little time out afterwards to get a bit deeper into my own poetry – the huldra-folk poems I began last year are expanding in new and fruitful directions, and I’m hoping for a lot from this break. See you all on the other side!

Now that the equinox is almost on us, I’m leaving the house just about dawn, and the only ones up are the joggers and the dog-walkers. I’m catching some bird behaviour I hadn’t expected, too. Ther mallards are all asleep on the muddy banks exposed by low water. Sometimes the turn of the tide catches them out, and they float away, bobbing like corks with their heads under their wings, apparently not a bit put out. The pigeons all sleep on the warm roof of a house where the central heating has been turned on, and the insulation isn’t up to much. And the sparrows are all gathered in a big leafy tree, usually a sycamore, where they appear to keep each other awake all night gossiping. Robins, blackbirds and a thrush are very early risers, and are marking out winter territories with song. The gull colony has dispersed, and their chimneys are occupied by crows and jackdaws. The housemartins are still here, but won’t be for long, and I’ve heard the first greylags.

I’ve been in the garden today, tidying up after a long time when I couldn’t seem to get out.Most of the flowers are over, but there’s still a bit of colour. These marigolds are planted at the edge of the vegetable patch, to take thutilitarian edge off it, and I hope to use them for both skin cream and plant spray to reduce mildew.

The witch hazel has been a fabulous addition to the garden. It flowers prolifically in January, comes into leaf early, and has now turned this lovely rich russet colour.

The berries have started to show. As well as this bright rowan – which the blackbirds haven’t got round to yet, I’ve saved the hips of three roses – the alba maxima, the gallica and the sweet briar, which have all ripened beautifully in this textbook summer we’ve had. I’m going to sow the seeds, and we’ll see if any of them come true. I’ve started to bring the tender plants into the greenhouse, to prune the bushes and to think about bulbs and next year’s window boxes and vegetable crops. The year is at the turn!