We’re used to things turning green in our climate. The default colour for our lush grass and vegetation, vibrant lichens, moss, freshly whitewashed walls towards the end of winter, unwashed car. The list goes on.

We’re used to regular rain. Maybe I should have got a grip by now and become a devout pluviophile.

But I’m afraid I’m like Karen Carpenter – incessant rainy days do eventually get me down. Our wonderful Met Office is excellent for the longer-term comparative perspectives of rainfall totals. Still, at an individual landscape/garden level their reports don’t quite capture the impact and consistent soil saturation which we’ve suffered for so many months now.

Never mind hoping for mean reversions, resignation is perhaps the best approach. The Lotusland climate of last April and May seems a very distant memory. For the record, our March 2024 tally of 217mm, with only 5 dry 24-hour periods at the beginning of the month (beaten only in 2023 – 331mm and 2019 – 241mm), has torrented seamlessly into the first week of April, with 113 mm falling in the first 6 days. These are seriously huge amounts of water falling on every square metre of this land.

However. Looking on the brighter side of life, this spring we’ve added to our list of all things potentially green that surround us.

Green sheep. I kid you not.

It’s never happened before but look carefully at some of our hardy Tor ddu sheep, with their snazzy black and white wool and facial hair. The ewes often have quite tatty fleeces by the end of winter, but this year with little respite from nearly constant mild, damp or more often downright wet conditions for months, just now several of them have fleeces which really are turning green in places. Straggly matted wool collecting debris which in turn allows moss or algae to develop.

Thank goodness we opted for a native upland breed, a variant of the Welsh Mountain breed when we established our small flock. Thank goodness too for their vigour during the annual delights of spring lambing outside in our soggy, muddy fields. We’ve had some wonderful vignettes this year which remind us of the marvels of mammalian birth, about 147 days after the whole process was kicked off with the joining of a single ovum and a single sperm in the equally miraculous process of mammalian internal fertilisation and embryonic development.

One novelty this year happened after I’d picked out the on-her-own shape of Frostkist at the very bottom of our steep field in the torch beam on my 10.30 pm walk around the in-lamb ewes. She spotted me and immediately began to bawl – something that never happens with settled sheep at night. Returning inside to get Fiona out of her hot bath to investigate, sure enough, she had a problem pending and was undoubtedly calling for our assistance. Once we’d got her lying down amongst the soggy oak leaves on one of the few flat areas of land in this field, a quick feel showed she was never going to deliver her lamb unassisted. After a bit of effort finding, feeling, grasping and then pulling out first one pair and then the second set of small slippery hooves I’d managed to move the legs into the necessary position an inch or two out of her vulva for me to get my fingertips behind the lamb’s skull and lever it gently forwards and down. Hooves and head together are a physical impossibility to fit through a ewe’s pelvic canal if the lamb is large. (Frostkist, the daffodil below).

Suitably re-adjusted, with a sudden rush, following Frostkist’s push, the lamb (not that he or we knew it at this stage, but soon to be Ku) slithered into the world. There in the light of our beanie LEDs was the remarkable sight of this shocked, membrane-covered form leaving its secure warm watery womb haven for the chill air of a Welsh hillside. And his rapid transformation from curved slimy foetus to an air-breathing mini-sheep. Partly because of the physical shock and consequent sensory deluge on his lamb brain’s reticular formation together with the severance of its umbilical cord, and subsequent transient hypoxia, he spluttered and gulped in his first breath of clean Welsh air. Unseen surfactant in the lung’s alveoli enables these previously in-utero redundant lungs to spring into action, inflate and work effectively for the very first time. A complex, coordinated vital sequence of physiological events without which no mammal would make it past its first few independent minutes, severed from the security of uterine and placental nourishment.

I was telling our older 3 visiting grandchildren some of this last week, in simpler terms, and how we were shocked by the attendant consultant when their Dad was born, 8 weeks premature in Bristol Maternity Hospital. Surrounded by a gaggle of medical students, the doctor quickly took our newborn infant from the midwife, and held him aloft like a specimen, clearly struggling, with a heaving chest from a lack of surfactant to reduce surface tension in the lungs since he was so premature, then announced to all:

“See. Classic flail chest. Let’s get him up to the special care unit”.

And with an intra-nasal oxygen tube swiftly rammed down, off they rushed with him out of the “delivery suite”. (Not much of a bedside manner we thought, later). But certainly leaving us parents a little shocked and hoping that all would turn out well. Which eventually, it did.

Negotiating the diagonal uphill walk across our wet steep field is always a challenge, even more so in the dark, from the gate in the bottom corner, centre of the image above. With a slippery lamb held low between warm hands, back bent double, as the concerned mother follows. Pausing every few yards for Mother to nuzzle and lick the still silent lamb, whilst Fiona brought up the rear shining the torch ahead for me, and the ewe. Frostkist knew, and most importantly remembered the ropes and was straight into her prepared pen, where she and the lamb, after a good iodine spray of the umbilical cord, and check of both teats for milk production, could be left in peace. To deliver his twin with no such trauma half an hour later. Frostkist, the recovering ewe below:

It would undoubtedly be easier for all concerned to lamb our few ewes inside, but on our small scale this works well and once into a pen bedded down with our own native Purple Moor grass leaves, cut from our bottom field, ewe and lamb can recover and bond well. We’ve had more problems with neonatal infections in lambs born inside in apparently clean pens, so prefer it this way.

A week later with what might be the last storm of the year, “Kathleen”, due to hit later in the day after a dramatic early morning cloudscape, we had two more memorable lambings. Happy started bawling mid-afternoon, and eventually after making no apparent progress we opted to bring her in. Just as well since her cervix was too tight for me to get more than 2 fingers and a thumb through. Minutes of silence passed as Fiona held her still whilst I struggled to achieve any significant stretching of what felt like a very thin, but tough circular band of tissue, about 8 cm into the vulva.

You can get an idea of what one’s trying to achieve yourself if you make a rough circle out of the thumb and first finger of your left hand, and press the 2 tips together hard. Then push the thumb and first two fingers of your right hand into this roughly 5 cm opening. In my case, I can just about get them up to the first finger joint. Now, still holding the left thumb and fingertips as tightly touching as you can, try forcing them apart by spreading the thumb and forefingers of the right hand outwards. It’s actually quite difficult to get anywhere at all. Which was how I felt for ages, musing about what to try next. Clearly no chance of even touching a lamb at this point, let alone it making it out into the world.

Quite suddenly I sensed I was getting somewhere, the cervix tension reduced and I managed to get my fortunately narrow wrist into the womb to work out which bits of lamb I could feel. A similar presentation to Frostkist’s lamb meant it took me a while to grab and tug the hooves, and eventually hook out an enormous head. The meconium-covered greeny-brown foetus indicated that it was already becoming distressed by the delayed delivery.

I’m always struck by just how much physical force has to be used in such situations, and in turn marvel at how the lambs, and ewe seem to cope with this trauma. In this case, it was noticeable that her lamb struggled to get up on its front legs for a few minutes after delivery. Imagine how you’d feel if you’d had your limb tugged so hard.

More unusual still was that we had to repeat the procedure with her second lamb about 2 hours later. Happy, Karl and Killearnan, recovering from their ordeal the following day.

The day finished with a night-time slither to bring in Itzim, and her bonnie big lamb, with the added problem that as a more confused first timer, she lost interest in the lamb a third of the way across the field so suddenly dashed back to her birth site, in pitch dark and lashing rain, for us to have try again, only much more slowly, with the lamb held very close to her nuzzling mouth. Itzim a day later with Kyle, and Itzim the daffodil, below.

This year’s lambs, all named with ‘K’s’ began with a run of 4 ram lambs – 2 singles and then twins. Kier, Ken, …., Klux, you get the drift. Easy to remember, monosyllabic, simple names. The later ewe lambs will be named after daffodils, and linger longer in the memory and history of this place. With 5 more lambs now born, we’ll be running out of daffodil name options, soon.

Unusually, this year all the lambs seem very adept jumpers/climbers even at a young age, jumping onto the top of Fiona’s homemade baler twine hay nets hung in the corners of their mothers’ pens. Perhaps this doesn’t bode well for us during the ram lambs’ final adolescent weeks with us. Even more remarkable than the net climbing was watching Kier jump very impressively onto an ewe’s back at feeding time, then stand immobile and proud, impressed by his unique achievement, for a few brief seconds. Before realising that such a position was unsustainably risky, and it was certainly a lot safer amongst the crowd on terra firma, so jumped back down. (And it’s not just Kier doing this, who is number 1)

A curious, perhaps prophetic, sort of metaphor for the certain-to-be namesake future Prime Minister.

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Along with our changed daily routines of lambing time, as a distraction from fretting about the weather, I’ve benefitted hugely from my burgeoning Narcissophilia. To avoid confusion, I’m not a fan of those exhibiting Narcissistic tendencies. There seem to be more than enough of those populating the world’s political classes who annoy me. Often with other associated ‘Dark Triad’ traits.

Rather it’s the love of daffodils, or more precisely, Narcissus flowers. Curiously, Narcissophiles seem to get much less media attention than their more commonly recognised cousins, the Galanthophiles. Google the word and I note that there are just 276 results shown at the top of the page listings. By contrast, Galanthophiles has 47,200 choices. Still niche by Google standards, but 170 times more references. And given that daffodils are the most widely grown British spring flower, and globally have had well over 27,000 named cultivars registered, this seems strange.

By way of comparison, our grandchildren seem excited by a video game called Minecraft. I notice that this lists 1,090,000,000 results. WOW. Over a billion. Says it all, eh? No wonder I couldn’t get them interested in seeing Grumpy’s daffodils.

Perhaps the inevitable negative association with Narcissus, of Greek and Roman mythology, so obsessed with his own beauty and image, that he ignored all others, is too potentially damning. However, this is a shame, since if one does spend significant time studying these beautiful and very varied flowers, you’ll realise just how different and charming they can be. Way more interest and variety than snowdrops, I’d suggest.

So maybe Narcissophiles really do follow in their namesake’s ways.

Gazing obsessively at these spring gems, rather than at their own reflected beauty, so wonderfully imagined by Caravaggio in his C16th painting, below.

The flowers have certainly proved mostly very resilient and impressive in our wet and windy conditions this year. Not to mention bouncing back from the unpredicted heavy wet snow which fell about a week ago.

I clearly have my work cut out in trying to promote the many forms of the humble daffodil, which has delighted and inspired so many people over many years. I think part of the problem links back to dear William Wordsworth and his oft-quoted “host of golden daffodils”. Add this to the tendency for most municipal plantings to be of uniformly big, all-yellow flowers, and it’s not surprising to hear, as I did last week from a garden visitor:

“Well all daffodils are just the same, aren’t they?”

Red rag to a bull? “King Alfred” to a Narcissophile?

What has really struck me this year is not only the variation between cultivars but also the changes within a single flower over time. Often within even a day or two, as it grows the colours, height and even form can shift dramatically. This is partly why I’m struggling with definitive names for several since nurseries often give minimal descriptions and typically a single image of a near-mature flower. Take the rather lovely shortish ‘Roger’ below as an example.

I’m also a little surprised to find relatively few well-known artists seem to have created iconic paintings of them, and the few that can be found online are mainly still-life paintings of flowers in a vase, rather than scenes of drifts of flowers in a garden, or in a naturalistic setting. Although I do love this painting by French Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot, from 1885. We’d certainly give this space on our walls.

As for musical takes on daffodils, I discovered and enjoyed the simple melodic folk song, ‘Seven Daffodils’ written by Lee Hays and Fran Moseley. But struggled with more recent titular attempts by Mark Ronson, and Florence and the Machine, which don’t seem to rock my boat or fit with the simple delights of a host of daffodils buffeted by a strong breeze, or backlit by fleeting, setting sunshine.

The Brothers Four are still around and even going on tour this year, 66 years after they formed as a group in Seattle in 1957.

So I feel there’s a lot more work to be done by confirmed Narcissophiles in spreading the word about the simple pleasures of spending a bit more time in the company of daffodils.

Gazing into their blooms, reflecting on their beauty, and thanking the small band of obsessed breeders and hybridisers around the world who’ve created such a huge palette of flower colours and forms that the contemporary gardener can plant. Even if tracking down some of the excellent but older cultivars can be a bit challenging. My last musical choice for this post is “Pavanne in Burnt Orange” by contemporary British composer Julie Cooper, from her recent CD “Oculus”. Worth a listen as you scroll through some more daffodil photos, perhaps?

(The above blooms cut in the wind and rain for a no-show garden visitor today, so readers get to enjoy them instead).

On reflection (sorry, it must be a subconscious theme for this post), it’s probably the fairly recent diversity which hybridisers have achieved amongst the Narcissi umbrella, which came too late for many older artists. One of the iconic daffodils named after a multi-generational family of British daffodil breeders is ‘Mrs. R.O. (Sarah) Backhouse’, shown below. I’ll revisit the Backhouses, perhaps in my next post.

Would W.W. turn in his grave? Pink cupped daffodils. Pahh !! As crazy as yellow snowdrops!!

And yet, and yet. One can’t but help (or at least I can’t)  be seduced by the close up beautiful colour combination of this daffodil under our grey skies and lashing rain.  Named by her husband Robert Backhouse in 1923 in memory of his late wife Sarah Elizabeth, née Dodgson (1857-1921), who was a great daffodil breeder. It was one of the first pink daffodils, and some would say still the most beautiful. Even if this year ‘Kathleen’ has savaged her normally pristine perianth a little.

Another factor limiting artists’ efforts at capturing Narcissi in their work is that large naturalised daffodil populations capable of enticing artists out, “en plein air” with their easels and brushes, are really quite rare both in the UK and further afield. See some lovely examples from Ukraine,  Switzerland, Slovenia, Yorkshire, and Gloucestershire.

It seems that bothering to find out who the hybridiser of a particular cultivar was, and where it originated can also be a good guide to performance in a particular garden/soil/climate.

For us, several of the most vigorous and lovely ones have originated from Ron Scamp in Cornwall, and Grant Mitsch in Oregon. Although many of the classic looser, and yet-to-be-identified and named forms I’ve obtained from Croft 16 daffodils in the very far North West Of Scotland, take some beating.

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Despite the terrible run of wet weather, the 4 colonies of honey bees which we entered autumn with are still all active. And having somewhere safe and warm to escape the weather, are still mainly black, with not a hint of green in sight. During rare sunny moments, some have been very active, with masses of pollen being brought in.

The other thing I noticed on March 28th was them beginning to turn up at my crystal-encrusted pee-saving watering can, behind the back door. I’m pretty sure this is the earliest in the year that I’ve noticed them visiting.  During the last few days, I’ve had to remind myself both to give it a gentle kick before I pick it up, and also regularly use a long twig to try to rescue bees which have fallen off and are immersed in the toxic brew – several a day are rescued most days. It’s a really hazardous place to forage since they’ll need to make the equivalent of a VTOL manoeuvre to escape after they’ve filled up drinking from the sides of the can. The most recent symposium from Honey Be Watch, which will get uploaded for free access in due course, was a fascinating discussion of how to “beeline” foraging honey bees visiting a site for pollen, nectar or water, and track them back to their (possibly) wild colony. I’m thinking about using one of the suggested methods of dabbing coloured water-based paint onto a bee’s body which is regularly visiting a forage location and then monitoring the bee’s flight path, and timing how long it takes to return to try to work out if a ‘resource’ like my mineral-rich pee, is being exploited by more than one colony, and if so, which one(s). Watch this space for an update, if weather and time permits.

 

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Probably the one group of flowers which has excelled this spring, so far, despite the weather, has been the Camellias. With a marked lack of frosts, and my decision to start to mulch the bushes over the last 3 years with rotted leaf mould, as well as a dash of proprietary inorganic ericaceous plant feed, the flowers have been stunning for a few weeks, and always provide a selection of near-pristine blooms for me to place in our 2 blue water filled bowls for garden visitors to enjoy.

The aforementioned unpredicted snowfall created a unique appearance the following morning as the 2 inches of very wet snow quickly turned to a semi-transparent slush, rendering the colourful flowers into an impressionistic blurry mass, which I reckoned merited a photo or two to record for posterity.