January, belatedly ....

As a New Year resolution, I thought it would be a good idea to re-start the diary I used to keep of what goes on in the garden - plants, wildlife, weather etc.  An even better idea would be to do it online, so that friends and family can read it too.  If anybody else out there is interested enough to read on: welcome!

It's taken a little while to get started.  I have two-and-a-half months to catch up, so this is the January instalment.

We came back from our New Year travels to find the garden's half-tame pheasant waiting for us at the gate, very put out that no one had been feeding him during our absence.  He hadn't much cause for complaint; it had been relatively mild, if windy.  In fact the mild autumn meant that there was still quite a lot going on in the garden. The usual suspects were in flower - winter viburnums, winter jasmine, winter honeysuckle - as were the plants that flower sporadically in mild winters such as violas and wallflowers.  The earliest snowdrops were already out; not only Galanthus atkinsii, which is always the first to flower, but also G. elwesii.  So too was the biggest hellebore (is it H. argutifolius? I can never remember).  But there were also other things in unseasonable bloom: some rosebuds (which were realistically never going to open), a few tatty borage flowers, and the cowslips in the lawn, which have been going since October.  The wildlife was also thinking it was spring, with a blackbird singing quietly and a little huddle of four ladybirds enjoying the sun.

A few chilly nights saw off the borage and dampened the enthusiasm of the cowslips.  The later snowdrops (the doubles, then the singles), and the winter aconites, were out by the middle of the month, but otherwise things were slowed down by the colder weather.  The birds came more frequently to the feeders, and the windfall apples attracted not only the blackbirds and fieldfares but regular visits by a green woodpecker.  The Garden Birdwatch count this year was good - both the green and gt spotted woodpeckers, and four types of tit including the marsh tit.  And the red-legged partridges (common around here, they're bred for shooting) turned up regularly too; one morning we had 22 on the lawn!

 It was the last week of the month before we had a real cold spell, with light snowfall on 26 Jan and temperatures below zero in the daytime as well.  Much feeding of birds - particularly the pheasant, who considers my only function in life is to supply him with peanuts.  Winter at last!