Flowering Currant buds

Dear Readers, it might feel a bit early to be thinking about spring (especially as the pond is frozen over again today), but the plants are getting ready for it already, and if you have a close look, you’ll see that lots of shrubs and trees are full of buds, like the Flowering Currant in my garden. It didn’t like the weather at all last year, what with the wet, late spring, but hopefully this year will be better, and we’ll get lots of flowers and hairy-footed flower bees come March.

Male hairy-footed flower bee

There are buds on the ash trees, which look a little like the hooves of miniature deer….

Ash buds

And sticky buds on the horse chestnut – the stickiness is thought to deter insects and to provide a kind of  anti-freeze.

Sadly my Kilmarnock Willow looks as if it’s died, but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for a miraculous resurrection…

And because we’ve reached the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and the decorations are going away for another year (how do the years get so much shorter every cycle, I wonder?), here’s a poem that I’ve always loved, for the buds and for the sow. May we all be re-taught our loveliness this year.

Saint Francis and the Sow

By Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.