The wind was icy today, and any thoughts of returning to gardening had to wait until after tonight's long-booked woodland charity talk. I have never yet had to drop out of a talk at the last minute due to illness, and I try very hard not to, since if people are good enough to make the effort to run any kind of club or society the last thing they need is to be faced with a hall full of members and no entertainment. To be on the safe side I was not going to risk knackering myself again by trying to squeeze in a quick pruning session just to see how I felt, let alone crawl around weeding.
As a compromise I walked to the post box for a brief dose of exercise, sun and fresh air. The air was a great deal too fresh for me to want more than twenty minutes of it, but it was good to be out. I saw a substantial flock of what I took to be fieldfares darting around the trees in the lane, brown birds the size and shape of large thrushes. The Systems Administrator agreed that they probably were fieldfares. Apparently redwings, which look similar, are much rarer.
Opposite the post box the old churchyard was full of snowdrops. The church was converted to residential use in the 1970s, but a van of council workmen still arrive every now and then and keep the churchyard in about the right degree of order, so that it looks romantic and slightly wild while not being overrun with brambles and elder bushes. When metal thieves stole the gate a few years ago they even replaced it, to my surprise. If I lived in the church house I don't think I could resist sneaking out and planting a few cyclamen among the snowdrops every year, hoping that they would spread to form great patches.
Just around the corner a short length of the verge is thick with snowdrops, before they abruptly stop. Perhaps the soil conditions suddenly change and are no longer to their liking, but I wonder whether they are a relict of the house that old Ordnance Survey maps show once stood there. There are no actual ruins visible from the road, but did the long gone inhabitants once plant snowdrops along the lane in front? You would not get planning permission to build there now.
The owners of one of the cottages on the farm bought an extra acre of the old apple orchard facing their cottage a few years after moving in. At the time they said the main reason was that the farmer had been making noises about wanting to build on-site accommodation for the farm manager, and they wanted to make sure that if there was a new house it didn't go up right opposite theirs. In the event there was no farm manager's house. From what I've seen the planners take a dim view of attempts to build new farm houses in the countryside on farms where the existing farm house and cottages have only recently been sold separately from the land, so perhaps a farm manager's house was never really in the offing.
The neighbours have never done much with their acre beyond keeping the grass mown around the remaining apple trees, but I noticed walking back from the post box that their acre is starting to design itself, as columns of evergreen holm oak are growing up around several of the trees where the mower has not got to them. If the neighbours keep mowing, and the jays keep burying acorns, then in another decade or so they will have a regular grid of evergreen columns like something Tom Stuart-Smith might have designed.
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