Hawthorn Hill Farm Natury Diary: April 22

That’s the thing about the Swallow’s return. And the Cuckoo call. About the wildflower flush in the meadow in Spring. It anchors you to a repeated past. Promises a repeated future. What was is, still, what is. And that feels precarious. Not certain. And so. We hold our breath. Until they come.

April is a hungry month. Farmer and wildlife both wait for the rippling green. The greening of the trees as it flows like a tide from the the sea of the land. Tree green. Grass green. Leaf green. The dark green sea of a field whose shimmer can swallow a fox, a bird, a lamb. The Wild Cherry Blossoms last a Swallow’s flit on the branch it seems. The Blackthorn, the first great wild bloom, embroiders it’s thorny grid with the Limerick lace of itself. Whole hedgerows consumed by it’s needlepoint.

The Sparrowhawk hunts the driveway. Waiting for the car to come to flush a thrush or blackbird from the thorny ditches. The deer slide into sight, dark and fallow on the crest of the hill and slide from the world and were never there again. The Ravens call and bicker above the treetops with the crows. The buzzards done with courting hunt the lambing field. The farm is loud with the sound of birds in the still bare trees.

I wait for the flush of the wildflowers. Will they come? Will they come? I always feel it. The thin edge of fear that shears away the certainty from me with it’s sharpness. I can feel it. The worry grows like the grass that doesn’t. Like the flowers that don’t. Like the cold that comes in early April and is the touch again of the winter that was gone. Will todays lambs be born the wrong side of the freeze? Will the fox hunt them the right side of the freeze? Will the hay last? Will the swallows come? Or has everything broken the way I fear it will? Is that change now? This year…

As farmers we are anxious for the certainty of things. But we live with uncertainty. Of grass, and weather and wet and drought. Of time and prices and the worth of work. Of how well we will lamb and how is full with calf and who is not. But this new uncertainty has a sharpness to it that underpins all things.

The wildflowers pick their own way through the blossoming month. In their own time they unfold. Primrose first which has been here but now grips more clearly the banks and bare bits of the land. Herb Robert here and there. Snowdrops. Crocuses. In the bright warm sun the bees crowd their bells, balls of pollen gathered on their legs. Food for their future plans, the protein the building blocks of new brood. The Buff Tailed Bumblebees and then the Carders come. The Bugle flushes in the far lawn, creeping year by year to what this months work will make the new hay meadow. Midges cloud in revolving columns and the bats begin to hunt. Blackthorn embroiders it’s thorny lattice with Limerick Lace flowers. I find a double row where the fragrance hits me, the roadside half hedge and half stone wall. The golden saxifrage comes. A flush in the alder woods where the light is bright, the trees bare. Crowds of Marsh Marigolds gather their skirts beneath the slim trunks of the smooth Alders in the woods, butter coloured islands in the deepening growing green

The trees come green. The Poplar first. Followed quickly by the elder. The willow too then comes. Hazel begins to unpack. Beech trees too with the Bluebell beneath coming late to blossom.

The Peackocks, the Green Veined Whites, and the Speckled Brown butterflies finally take flight. Feeding on the drifts of dandelions that colonise the verges. They have flown before this Spring and been frozen back to sleep but as April comes to a close they are now a firm fixture of the day. Hopeful for the flush of flowers. I am in their company with that.

The Orange Tips and Whites totter along the hedgerow. Laser Guided Randomness in their flight till the secent of a flower hooks them and draws them down as if connected by a wire, tears them out of the air to themselves like a ripped page.

The honeybees wake up. I see them forage in the Snowdrops. Bundling wasps from the entrance to their hive. The Bumble Bees too. The Carder and Buff Tailed bees who hunt the small patches of Bugle in their tens and twenties. Each patch crowded even in it’s smallness with a constant thrum of bees. More of both for the farm I think.

The Cuckoo Flower comes and with it the first distant sound of the Cuckoo call. “Have you heard her?” a farmer asks. “It;s how we say it, Have you heard her?” His car still rolling a broad smile on his face as he parks and talks and rolls down the window. “Now we can get on with it. It will be alright from here on in, God willing”. The Cuckoo a ritual shared by people who wait for it. The relief shared too.

The Orange Tip drifts about the farm looking for the Cuckoo Flower to lay on. And the swallow one day later, perched on a wire and now away with a trailing tail as it hawks across the hill that flows down to the valley floor. The woodpecker drums in the woods. The fox hunts the hill, the dog fox bold on the road and regarding me with disdain. The vixen quiet and close to the newly dug den. Spring quickens and gallops and then races beyond the grip of winter.

We wait. For the curve of a calf beneath it’s mother. For the nicker of a lamb behind the arching care of it’s mother. We wait for Swallow come and Cuckoo call. We wait for things to have be as they always have been because we worry that they might not always be. And the come. And. For one year more. They are and will be. And the breath comes and we can get on with the year.