It’s sunny this Saturday, after a prolonged spell of very wet weather. The Somerset Levels are soaked, the River Frome is high, and the days are noticeably longer now, with sunset around 5.30. I can pop into the garden after work, which is nice. And I have a growing ‘to do’ list for the garden, and opportunity to do things, which is also nice. 🙂

This week for Six on Saturday my selection includes a rainbow, crocus, daffodil, blue sky, viburnum and a few signs of spring on the way after the incessant rain.

This week the daffodils are starting to open, and they’re beautiful little things. We mostly have tete-a-tete, the small daffodils that have less tendency to flop over. We bought about ten pots of them at the end of last spring, when they were almost finished flowering and very very cheap. My lovely husband planted them out, and they bring me joy.

The spring bulbs are beginning to bloom, we have crocus, snowdop and anemone coming up.

These slightly blurry shots were taken this morning, when it was still pretty dark, but I did get some nice shots of the garden at sunrise. As you can see, the back garden is mostly shaded still.

The lighter days are definitely lifting my mood.

We still have cold wet weather ahead, but the days will get longer, and there will be rainbows. 🙂

My final pick for the ‘six’ is this beautiful viburnum. We are slowly establishing a shrubbery in an awkward triangular bed in a dark corner by the pergola. I am very happy to see that this one is getting established – perhaps the placement of this lucky horseshoe four leaf clover helped?

For more ‘Six on Saturday’ collections, visit the Garden Ruminations blog, where Jim has some beautiful camellia flowers.

In other news this week, my forest filmmaking friend Charly has released a new film in the ‘Wood for The Trees’ series about the future of forests in the UK. This episode is all about coppicing.

Can the oldest form of management help bring woodlands back to life?

Archaeological evidence from Somerset Levels ‘Sweet Track’ indicates that coppiced wood was used to make tracks across the marshes from 4,000 BCE.

This recreation in Somerset gives you the idea of how useful they’d be to cross the soggy ground.

I used to work on this series, and I always said the latest Wood For The Trees was the best one yet.

This one’s even better. 🙂

This week I also enjoyed a sweet viral thread on the social media platform ‘bluesky’ all about Moth Professors, which inspired me to post about Lepidopterology.

Moths, butterflies and bluesky

And another thing! I checked my google stats for this blog and was astonished to see thousands of visits from China. I realised recently that this blog is nearly ten years old and I’d never set up Google indexing or analytics. That’s a massive part of my day job working with websites, but not something I’ve ever done for this personal journal of my garden plans and plants…

Hello world! 🙂

So I checked the stats, and said ‘Hello’ in various languages (hopefully) to the thousands of bots visiting for goodness knows what reason. And I want to say a HUGE thanks to my 54 repeat visitors, you know who you are, and I probably know who you are, so thanks for coming and reading my nonsense and liking my poorly lit photos. It’s lovely to have you around!

Happy Valentines to all!

J x