Bumper flowering this year of snowdrops and the first of our daffodils are in flower, If it wasn’t for the howling winds an cold you would think spring was here 
Frogs, toads, lizards and geckos are stirring as well.
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It is here. 
Here being Lot-et-Garonne. Even the grue are managing to fly north east, untouched by what’s happening further north.
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We heard and then saw 100 or so grues flying north yesterday, in Lot. They were quite low, under the cloud base. Weather better today so we’re looking out for more. I love to hear/see them.
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We’ve had the tall daffs out for ages, although I imagine they’ll be flat now! The clumps of the dwarf ones should survive and they’ve just started coming out.
We missed snowdrops this year - I wonder if the voles like them as much as they like crocus bulbs 
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We picked the last of the tomatoes from the greenhouse today and the Kerria Japonica and Orange Blossom are starting to flower as well.
I’m not going outside at the moment but we have (and have had for a long time) a huge, beautiful and spirit-lifting carpet of cyclamen coum…
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It’s been a weird winter here, in one of the south facing sheltered window boxes we still have some lobelia flowering.
It feels like a very long grey winter up here
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Our main problem in Cornwall is the relentless wind especially of course on high ground. The temperature today is 7c but feels like - 1 and you do feel it more as you get older. The trees are tortured into fantastic shapes. So we are totally amazed at how well our two Catalpa bungie trees are doing that we brought back with us from southern Dordogne. The rubbery trunk just bends in the wind and the compact head seems to protect most of the leaves.
It’s amazing what survives and what doesn’t isn’t it?
We just had at least a thousand of the noisy visitors fly right over our house.
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We heard them coming today, at about 6:15pm. Thousands. I only got 124 photos… Now it’s dark but we just heard some stragglers.
We dashed outside as another large formation was circling right above the house as the wind was blowing the poor devils back across the valley.
That’s fabulous isn’t it. Happened to us too about 4pm. That tends to be the time they reach us.
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I remember visiting Cornwall’s exquisite Minack Theatre about twenty years ago…
… and noticing that the surrounding cliff’s groundcover included many South African aloes and succulents that I’d had in my garden in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, whose climate resembles that of New Mexico. The only difference was the English plants were very green rather than the intense burnt oranges and reds that these plants acquire during the EC’s hot dry summers.
OH has told me that the daffs are literally just starting to stick their heads out of the ground. No primula yet either, it has been too cold, with strong ground frosts on and off for the past fortnight, and although it has been sunny, it is still too cold for much to be happening.
The flowers on the coastal paths in spring are just amazing. Unfortunately they’re allowing too much sheep grazing and so it’s not so good as it used to be