Driving around Oxfordshire these last few weeks and looking at the countryside, I do not see a ‘green and pleasant land’ – it is brown. The trees are brown and so is the grass. Here we are in the second week of April and there is almost no new plant growth. The wildlife are hungry and deer have taken to rural gardens in their search for food. Plants I have lovingly tended are being stripped of their foliage, stems roughly pruned. You can’t blame the deer. It’s not their fault that this winter has dragged on for so long and if there are evergreen shrubs and bulb foliage they can get at they’re bound to do their best to get at them. It’s been interesting to see what plants attract deer in a domestic garden. The mossy mounds of Saxifraga x arendsii were one of the first to be sampled, the green rosettes nipped off. They didn’t eat all of them and some were left scattered, so maybe they weren’t too keen.

Also palatable is Euonymus fortunei, this one being ‘Silver Queen’. This plant has lost nearly all its foliage and is looking distinctly twiggy. I know deer also enjoy the small leaved Euonymus japonicus microphyllus, because a few years ago they ate one of mine down to the ground.

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The birds got it wrong, didn’t they. There they were, all optimistic and full of song and now winter has returned with a vengeance. It isn’t snowing here any longer, but it hasn’t melted and the ground is frozen solid. No worms for the ‘early bird’ to catch at the moment. A week or so ago, the soil temperature was around 5C, now it is back to just above 0C.

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This winter seems to be lasting forever, but the birds know that spring is on the way. Pigeons (Columba palumbus), who always start early, already have young ones in the nest as seen from discard shells on lawns and pathways. Other birds are toying with nesting materials, picking up moss and plant stems to examine their suitability for building. The singing is noticeably louder – robins, dunnocks, thrushes and chaffinches are now all in full voice and their songs fill the air from dawn to dusk.

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I had an enjoyable afternoon renovating a gloomy corner of a garden the other day. Some overhanging branches of a large sycamore tree in a neighbouring garden had been removed the year before and the space revealed made it clear how the nearby shrubs had been straining for light. A Rosa moyesii had leaned over and laid half of its tall stems over a Viburnum tinus, which was itself leaning over a variegated Photinia davidiana ‘Palette’. As I stood looking at it all and thinking about where to begin work, I spotted an old nest perched on top of the confused mass of stems. It was obviously old because there was grass growing out of the top, so I got it down for a closer look and was fascinated to discover that the original nest had been re-purposed, not once but twice.

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The birds are already nesting and for the past week, I’ve seen the discarded white shells of half a dozen pigeon eggs on lawns and pathways. Pigeons always start nesting early, though, and they finish late in the year. Now that March is with us and the weather is starting to warm again, other birds are thinking of nesting. More birds are singing, to attract mates and defend their territories. Various materials are being gathered and arranged with secret skills into snug nests. In trees, bushes, hedges, sheds, plant pots, nooks and crannies and even the pocket of a coat left hanging on a tree, great works are being carried out.

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At every garden I visit just now, I am attended by one or two robins (Erithacus rubecula). They look and behave so much alike that, when there is just the one robin in attendance, it almost feels like the same bird is following me about from one garden to another. You read that male and female robins are identical, but this is not the case – there is a difference, but it is slight and because robins often stand side-on when they’re watching us, it isn’t easy to see. The difference is seen in what can be described as the ‘hairline' and is clearly shown in the linked photographs here; the female bird’s hairline is ‘V’ shaped and the male’s is ‘U’ shaped. You can make out the ‘V’ in the picture below (taken with a zoom lens from some distance away). Since the eggs are incubated by the female only, this makes the distinction clear.

During late winter and early spring, robins form pairs and this makes it easier to tell male and female apart. It was only a week ago, when a pair of mated robins were bold enough to stand facing me for some minutes, just a metre away from where I was kneeling, that the difference became truly obvious. One robin had a distinct ‘V’ hairline and the other had a much flatter ‘U’ hairline. The two birds watched every move I made as I weeded through a rockery, darting forward to pick up worms and insects and then moving back to keep their vigil a short distance away.

The habit robins have of following gardeners is age old and at one time, when there were fewer humans, they more often followed wild pigs to find the food unearthed by the pigs' foraging snouts. This is called ‘commensal feeding’, with humans being the ‘beaters’ and robins being the ‘attendants’. It isn’t confined to robins, either; think of the gulls and crows that follow the farmer’s plough. Blackbirds do it as well – there have been many occasions when I’ve dug a planting hole, gone to pick up the plant and returned to find a blackbird in the hole, busy finding worms.

Robins are extremely territorial and their behaviour towards each other outside the mating season is hostile, sometimes resulting in fights to the death, but during late winter and spring they make charming company for gardeners. Some are restless, flitting from branch to ground, others will sit in a nearby shrub and sing their quiet, wistful sub-song. The reason for sub-song is probably that they are singing to themselves, but it is easy to hold the impression that it is sung for us alone, for surely no other bird could hear it.

From ‘Address to a Robin’

Come, sweetest of the feathered throng,
And soothe me with thy plaintive song;
Come to my cot, devoid of fear,
No danger shall await thee here…

Hop o’er my cheering hearth, and be
One of my peaceful family
Then soothe me with thy plaintive song,
Thou sweetest of the feathered throng.

Edward Jenner (1749-1823)
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After the cherry tree was cut down, I stacked some of the wood into a couple of piles so that it could rot down and continue to provide a habitat for the various wood-boring insects, and those who use the holes and tunnels once they are finished with by the original excavator. Looking through some of the pieces of wood, I saw fragments of metallic green insect body parts, and in looking for answers, for a few short and glorious days, I thought they might be the remains of the rare and endangered noble chafer beetle (Gnorimus nobilis). How exciting that would be.

What I thought might have been the remains of a noble chafer beetle
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I like to leave the seed heads of flowering plants on over winter for two reasons. One, because they are attractive when frosted at a time when there isn’t a great deal of interest to be found in the garden and, two, because birds such as Goldfinches, Greenfinches and Siskins eat the seeds. It saves a bit on buying bird food, it gives us something to marvel at when we see the birds taking the seeds and the birds themselves will benefit from finding them.

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Last autumn, the lovely old cherry in the garden had to be felled. Estimated to be about 120 years old, we knew its days were numbered but were still surprised when we got up one morning to find a large branch had fallen off in the night. The wood of the fallen branch was clearly rotten.

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There is a corner at the end of the garden where we’d like to grow a few vegetables – it is sunny and warm but, for a couple of reasons, the soil needed some major work on it. Firstly, I have wondered if the previous occupants here ever added any organic matter to the soil; it seems a bit thin and stony and there isn’t a great deal of worm activity. Secondly, to screen the really rather inoffensive shed they’d planted six conifers, (some variety of Chamaecyparis lawsonia, I think) with the result that the soil for many feet around is bone dry. With not a little pleasure, we removed them. Even with the incredible amount of rain in 2012, the soil was still very dry indeed and I decided to try an idea new to me: composting trenches.

Instead of adding your vegetable kitchen waste to the compost heap, you dig a trench or a hole, at least a foot deep, and bury it. This adds moisture and nutrients at the root zone and encourages the activity of worms and other soil creatures. Starting in late autumn, a trench was dug where the conifers had been.

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