Too Busy in the Garden to Write About Gardening

This year's most beautiful tulip. 

I often write about gardening at this time of year - even though I'm absolutely no expert, and a very haphazard kind of gardener! I like flowers, I like to nurture things along. I have a big cottage garden and I don't mind weeds. I spray nothing and the lawn isn't so much a lawn as a big stretch of grass with daisies and forget-me-nots and clover in it.

The bees love it.

This year, this strange and frightening year, I've been counting my blessings in having a garden every single day. The weather has been chilly but fine, and I've been spending hours out there every day. Too busy in the garden to write about gardening. Normally, I would be chasing my tail with work, always thinking that I should be doing something else.

Well, I still have work, especially writing work, and I'm doing that too. But most of my antique dealing is in abeyance at the moment. Will I ever go back to it? Well, probably, after a fashion. But all the same, I'll be making some significant changes, of which more later.

Meanwhile, the garden and the village are proving to be a wonderful distraction from the worries about family and friends and income.

In the countryside, things are going on very much as usual. The farmers are still working hard. I heard of somebody asking a local farmer how he was coping with the solitary working - to which, of course, he replied 'What's new?' Tractors are passing along the village street. Ploughing is going on. You can see the seagulls hovering over the new furrows. And a few miles away, on the coast, the newest of new potatoes are already being dug.

This road is generally quite quiet, mostly because there is a sharp bend at one end (fortunately with heavily listed buildings on either side) and the big lorries can't negotiate it. The community shop is thriving because people are suddenly appreciating the benefit of having a good grocery store within walking distance. Long may it continue.

And in the garden at certain times of day, the chorus of birds is deafening. Especially the rooks and the jackdaws. It isn't really peaceful - except very late at night - but it is as bonny and soothing as any spring I've ever known, worries and all.