"Spring`s here, Winter`s not gone"

This Easter Saturday morning was an interlude of grey, cold damp hours between the rains of the night and the incoming rainclouds of the afternoon. The celandines refused to open their flowers.

Forsythia just opening its buds in a garden hedge.

This tall camelia is sheltered by the house and is a mass of lovely blooms this year.





Three of my favourite Lenten Hellibores which grow in a group under the shade of ash trees and hazel.


Daffodils defy the rain around the base of a crab apple tree.

A paler, faintly striped camelia which catches rain and frost. Each bloom lasts just a day before the petals brown and drop.

At last, growing through a gravel path, is the first garden violet of this spring.

Here is a poem by Edward Thomas, which captures so well this time of year, when winter seems loath to give way to the brighter, warmer days of a new spring.

But These Things Also

But these things also are Spring`s-
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;

The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds` dung
In splashes of purest white:

All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter`s ruins
Something to pay Winter`s debts,

When the North blows, and the starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring`s here, Winter`s not gone.

by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)