snow had fallen (a very tiny amount)

I wound the bathroom blind up this morning to find a very light dusting of snow on the lawn, and settled on the leaves of the Magnolia grandiflora.  After sorting out the cats' breakfast and the chickens' morning treat of porridge oats and sultanas, and defrosting their water, I refilled the bird table.  The little crowd of tits, robins and finches was back within seconds, too cold and too hungry for the luxury of flitting around playing at being frightened by me.

A mixed flock of pheasants and pigeons was under the young oak, eating more of last autumn's bumper crop of acorns.  There were still quite a few left, when I raked up a few more oak leaves not so very long ago, but they won't last long at this rate.  I don't especially welcome pheasants into the garden, since they eat fritillaries and other flowers, but I don't grudge them acorns in this weather.  The nuts make a mess of the grass anyway, or sprout like weeds when the squirrels and jays cache them in the borders, so I'm really quite grateful for something to get on and eat them.  Just as long as the pheasants don't all come back for pudding in the fritillary season.

In the front garden the blackbirds have moved in en masse on the three trees of Malus 'Red Sentinel'.  They always leave these until late in the winter, and as the fruit are capable of hanging on the tree for a very long time if nothing takes them, the display of small, bright red apples lasted right through January.  I don't know if the birds find the fruit unpalatable, only to be eaten after finishing everything nicer, or if they find the slender branches, bowed down under the weight of fruit, uncomfortable to perch on.  Whatever the reason, the 'Red Sentinel' season is always late, but has finally been declared open.  I like the blackbirds, except when they eat the soft fruit or peck holes in the eating apples before they're ready to pick.  I enjoy their full-throated song, and the chuck of their alarm calls.  The cocks are handsome birds, plump, black and sleek, yellow of eye and of bill.  The hens are softer-looking creatures.  I don't begrudge them the crab apples.

It wasn't a day for working outside.  The Systems Administrator announced that as it was the weekend it was time to light the fire 'up the top', so that we could have our Saturday night dinner at the dining table instead of on our laps in the study or in the kitchen.  The SA gets cabin fever if confined to the study for too long, and regards eating the evening meal in the kitchen as a social failure in a way that I can't fathom.  Having grown up with an Aga I've always liked kitchens, anthracite fumes and all.  But it is sensible to get some warmth back into the fabric of that end of the house from time to time.  By this morning the temperature in the sitting room had fallen to 11 degrees C.  After putting the radiator on mid morning, and burning a fire all day (with coal as well as logs), it took until half past four in the afternoon for the first ball in the galilean thermometer on the mantelpiece to drop.  This thermometer is remarkably accurate, judged against the weather station indoor sensor, and the lowest ball is calibrated at 18 degrees C.  The temperature outside didn't rise above freezing all day, and I think remained at minus one or minus two, and I never switched off the greenhouse heater at all.

One of the friends I saw yesterday has simply retreated with her husband and dog to one room for the duration.  They live in a larger and colder house than this one, and with the price of coal what it is aren't able or willing to keep a fire going in two rooms all day.  Some do-gooding organisation suggested a couple of months back that people like us should be encouraged to move into smaller homes that we could afford to heat, freeing up our surplus space for families.  Apart from the fact that we like our existing homes, and the peace, and the privacy, and our gardens, and having enough shelf space for our books, that is a really helpful suggestion and I've never have thought of it by myself.  Wow.  Thanks loads.  Actually, other friends who live in better insulated, or smaller, or less open plan houses, or just spend three times as much as we do on heating, are sometimes worried by the idea that in winter you simply retreat from a chunk of your house.  It's fine.  Compared to all the people who can't afford to heat even the one room, or who live in flats so shoddy and badly built that they can never be made properly warm or dry, we have absolutely nothing to grumble about at all.  It is a peculiarly English thing, a certain kind of middle class bohemiamism, to deliberately make oneself so elaborately uncomfortable.  You can tell we are the sort of people who went for a week's canal holiday in a boat heated only by a coal burning stove, in October.

The cold weather and charging about doing things have made my chest worse again, and although I am very sorry that one of the friends we were due to see tonight is ill himself, it is probably just as well that we don't have to clamber into the car at about the point the snow is due to arrive and go out to supper.  April might be the cruellest month, but Eliot hadn't tried living in a 60s built timber framed house in north Essex in February.  Maybe if he had he'd have considered it a luxury, making it to the point where the dead land started breeding any lilacs.

yellow and black and pale and hectic red

The leaves are turning, at last.  The hazels around the edge of the wood are going a subdued yellow, and the field maples in the hedge stand out as splodges the colour of butter, viewed from across the lettuce field.  The first cherry to change is 'Tai Haku', which is turning a soft plum red.  The wild gean, which I can see from my desk, is flushing an ever darker shade of green, and there is the first hint of red in the top branches.  Many cherries have superb autumn colour, a fact commonly overlooked by those garden writers who dismiss them as one season trees, since they fell out of fashion.

The birch trees turn yellow, and are doing it at different rates.  One of the bottom lawn trio of river birches, Betual nigra, has already changed colour and dropped most of its leaves, while another within the same group is still mostly green.  A wild seedling birch that placed itself in the spoil heap at the end of the conservatory is going a rusty brownish yellow.  It has a Vitis coignetiae growing up it, which is supposed to drape the birch in huge flaming vine leaves at this time of the year, but doesn't like the spoil heap as much as the birch, and is only making rather half-hearted growth.  I can see a few red leaves, but no glorious cascade.  With any luck it will get its roots down and really take off one of these years.  The Zelkova carpinifolia is a lovely strong yellow.  I like it, and I still think the boss is wrong about zelkovas.

The Amelanchier 'Ballerina' has gone a good shade of red, probably the best it has ever achieved.  I planted it partly for its autumn colour, which is supposed to be superb, but often it just goes a muddy shade of brown.  'Ballerina' has relatively large flowers, as amelanchier go, and sometimes I wonder if one of the species might have been a better choice.  Something wilder and more delicate.  But 'Ballerina' is a nice little tree.  It was selected in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  In the front garden the Cotinus has gone a vivid deep red.  I cut out the pieces that died, and am hoping that was down to the drought in spring and that the rest of it will be fine.

Up in the meadow the Liriodendron tulipifera, or tulip tree, is turning a rich, soft yellow.  In the back garden I've planted a little ginkgo, which also goes a fabulous warm yellow, but little is the operative word.  It isn't happy, and is growing at a snail's pace.  I put it in horrid clay, hoping that as it grows well as a London street tree it might tolerate poor, heavy soil, but the ginkgo doesn't seem to see it that way.

The birds haven't yet started stripping the yellow berried Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus', which is putting on a splendid show.  This has made a big shrub, and it responds to more than the lightest pruning by throwing up vertical water shoots, which spoil its shape.  I wonder how people get on who buy them for screening in smallish gardens.  Prune them so hard they don't have any shape, I suppose.  The Malus 'Red Sentinel' are absolutely weighted down with fruit.  I met somebody at the Braintree talk who told me about a garden pest problem I'd never heard of before, thought she looked honest and sane and I believed her.  She has a 'Red Sentinel', which always used to hold on to its apples until the new year, as they do, then began to lose them in October.  She couldn't work out what was taking them for quite a long time, until she saw the culprit in the act.  She lives near a river, and the creature climbing her tree and eating the apples was a moorhen.

Addendum  Tonight's Choral Evensong on R3 (repeated from last Wednesday) was from the chapel of Merton College, Oxford.  I was christened there.  A punch bowl from the Senior Common Room had to be pressed into service as an improvised font, since college chapels don't normally have one.