Happy Easter.

No news has been good news, at least here, over the last month as the world continues to convulse. Again.

I’m posting this on Easter Sunday, to record some of the many things that have occupied me for the last 4 weeks.

But I’ll begin with this beautiful recording from Cardiff, performed by the orchestra and chorus of the Welsh National Opera, and filmed 4 years ago to celebrate the 75th anniversary of their founding. For lots of reasons, it’s a unique film and sound, capturing a period drifting into the back of our collective memories, but one I hope will be retained and reflected on for years to come – its fall-out effects are still massive on our societies, in so many ways.

This is the Easter Hymn from Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry). He composed this one-act opera for which he is most famous in 1888, in just the 2 months he had left until the closing date for a competition for new operas by young composers who had never had one of their works performed on stage before. He only heard about the competition at this very late stage.

No matter what we believe in, it’s hard to deny the power of this music and its meaning. It’s set on Easter morning in a 19th-century Italian village, and Santuzza’s character (Camilla Roberts, below) sings the Easter Hymn to herself, as her Sicilian village residents take part in Easter festivities.

“Inneggiamo, il Signor non è morto” — “We rejoice that our Savior is living!”

We rejoice that our Saviour is living!
He all-glorious arose from the dead;
Joys of heaven the Lord to us giving,
All the sorrows of darkness are fled!

A strong carmine dress, and a powerful visual way to kick off a truly kaleidoscopic record here, in a photo-heavy post to capture scenes and events before my memory of them fades.

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It must begin with the wonderful news of how well ‘Jetfire’ – the crow, or raven, or kite blinded ewe – and her lamb have progressed since my description of her terrible trauma last time. More good news following crisis. We have renamed her lamb ‘Little Meg’ – since ‘Mary Poppins’, (our first choice) which is a pale hoop petticoat daffodil which we’ve trialled this year, seems to be very prone to slug attack, and may not prove to be garden, or meadow-worthy, here.

‘Little Meg’, above, is a taller, scented, later-flowering jonquil form, which we also bought in 2025, and is shown below as its first flower opened a few days ago.

The first day we carefully let the blind ‘Jetfire’ out into the field from her pen along our green lane about 10 days after Meg had been born, she crashed into everything, even with guiding hands, and at a slow walk. I quickly worked out that she would follow me very closely if I walked slowly and kept talking to her, and rattled a few food pellets in the pink sand castle bucket we’ve always used for measuring their food. (An odd colour choice, since I’ve just discovered that sheep have only dichromatic vision, so will likely perceive pink as a shade of grey or blue.)

Within 24 hours, she was finding her way around the field’s perimeter with ‘Meg’ glued to her side. Getting them back into a pen at night also proved to be much easier than we anticipated, and once the rain abated a little, and the fields dried up a bit, the issue with mud and slippery surfaces, which had plagued our land for months, began to settle.

Her left eye, which suffered apparently complete globe damage, or even total removal, as well as eyelid lacerations, was left with a completely occluding, protective fibrinous clot, which formed within 24 hours, and which I left in place for weeks, other than early bathing of the lid margins. The right eye, also with lid lacerations, corneal trauma and consequent oedema, looked as though it might eventually be viable, though we doubted there would be any residual vision left in it.

However, around 6 weeks on from the attack, she appears to be able to see quite well through her right eye. The corneal odema and consequent blue-whiteness has completely resolved, and I knew she really was feeling better, when she began to head-butt one of her fellow ewes in the regular flock hierarchy behaviour rites. She also now leads the charge towards me at feeding time, and is still up for having her chin tickled. Her left eye socket has almost completely resolved to a post-surgical enucleation-like, sunken appearance, and her now shortened tail has almost completely healed. A remarkable recovery, and one which we think justifies our decision to persevere with her, rather than have her ‘put-down’, or ‘destroyed’ to use the typical euphemisms.

‘Meg,’ and all the other (ewe) lambs have quickly picked up their ewe’s friendly traits, and feeding time on dry or damp mornings is one of my daily treats. Despite the weather earlier in spring, having fewer lambs this year has been a boon, and having them much earlier has also helped me, since they’d all arrived by the time the daffodils began to emerge in earnest.

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It’s been a stunningly good year for daffodil flowering this year – a point I discussed in the recent first outing of a new talk I’d worked on over the winter – “The Underclass: A Gardener’s Best Friends”. I’ve found it difficult to discover any hard science on what determines daffodil flower abundance in a particular year. But it clearly depends on how many of the bulbs which had formed towards the end of the previous bulb growing season (i.e. just after flowering finishes) were large enough to initiate a flower bud, which then sat dormant for the ensuing several months of late summer, autumn and winter. It’s therefore likely to depend on foliage surface area, and weather conditions whilst the leaves are still photosynthesising – so my guess is that last years’ exceptional light levels during March/April/May were very important. Go back to 2024, and many of these same months experienced very poor light levels – and consequently flowering in 2025 was disappointing. Look at the end of these webpages for our relevant weather data for March, April and May, in recent years. Which reveal there’s no point in looking at monthly means for either light, rain, or numbers of dry days – they vary so massively from one year to the next.

On an almost daily basis, I’ve wandered around our main daffodil trial areas, camera, pencil and notebook in hand, recording which cultivars flowers have opened. TODAY.  And once the flowers are fully established, taking measurements of critical flower and height dimensions to try to aid identification, and eventually hope to produce a useful reference guide to cultivar sizes, flowering times, and vigour.

Something it’s very difficult to glean from even the best catalogues.

As I was about to give my talk, a couple of key thoughts were added in at the last moment. Firstly, despite the often grey and damp weather here, West Wales is blessed with a really long spring growing season. I’d read on the recent New Hampshire Garden Solutions blog, that the author knew spring was truly beginning, when he spotted the first galvanised buckets attached to sugar maple trunks, and his very first daffodil bud poking through the ground. On March 16th!  A date by which we already had tens of different cultivars in full bloom. Our weather also allows the season to extend for much longer, since temperatures rarely  morph so swiftly into hot or dry summery conditions, which bring many daffodil flowers to a speedy end. It’s likely my talk will get another airing in due course since I’ve been asked to deliver it as a Garden Masterclass webinar in October.

Secondly, I’d checked up that whilst there are around 32,000 different named and registered daffodil cultivars worldwide, there are only about 3,000 different named tulips. Yet it’s in Keukenhof in Lisse in Holland, (not in Wales  – where the daffodil is the National flower or anywhere else in Great Britain – where the vast majority of daffodils in the world are apparently grown), that a huge annual festival celebrates spring in a garden in which the tulip takes centre stage. Apparently about 1.4 million visitors (each paying 21 euros) attend over a 7 week period, and around 7 million bulbs – mainly tulips – are planted each autumn, then ripped out at the end of the season to create a new display for the following year. No wonder the Dutch bulb industry is thriving.

However, there is a downside to buying dry bulbs, unseen, particularly from distant sources – from my experience there’s a high chance that the flower that emerges the following spring, won’t be the cultivar that you actually ordered. Or if it is, then it doesn’t perform in the way that the catalogue’s typically very brief description or image suggests. Order the same bulbs on 2 different occasions, and even if it’s vaguely the same, there may well be significant clonal differences. Or it’s a completely different variety.

One year I ordered more of the excellent ‘Actaea’, above, and was sent 200 of the one above this. Which, with help from Ron Scamp, I was able to discover was the equally vigorous ‘Merlin’.

I’ve also come to realise that for many individual daffodil cultivars, the flower’s appearance and colour will likely change dramatically as it grows and ages – not something that ever happens in a significant way with snowdrops, as with ‘Roger’ below:

This might seem over-nerdy, but if you’re planning to try to integrate daffodils with other plants in a garden setting, (as we like to do), these are all important parameters. Along with probably the most significant – when does it begin to flower, how vigorous and floriferous is the variety, how long do the flowers last in good condition, how well does it stand up to poor weather, how well does in perform in part shade, and how scented is it?

Mulling all this over, and the fact that we rarely get many garden visitors during our major daffodil season from mid March to the end of April, I have in mind trialling some sort of a daffodil workshop/discovery day next year. It will likely be for a maximum of 10 visitors, and as well as allowing people to visit the garden in the afternoon, I’d also be able to talk a bit more in the morning about some of the history, cultivation tips, and practical knowledge I’ve picked up over many years of trialling them here. I guess we now grow around 300 plus varieties, and the plan would also be to have some of these available to buy in deep pots, much as we’ve successfully done with snowdrops over many years. It would likely include lunch, tea/coffee and plenty of opportunity to raise questions, and chat with fellow visitors to share ideas or experiences.

Should this be of any interest to anyone reading this, it would be worth dropping me an email to go onto a provisional list for contact much later this year, or early in 2027.

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I’ve also been out photographing the daffodils which have grown from seed I’ve scattered in our upper hay meadow over the last many years. This year’s count of about 770 eclipses the roughly 350 which appeared last year. They’re also, as anticipated, appearing in many new parts of the meadow in small numbers. It’ll be another 4 or 5 years before the real impact develops from all the seed I was able to harvest and scatter last year, after an excellent pollination season. Careful observation of this area has also confirmed to me that nothing like all the seed germinates the following spring, or grows at the same rate – a good survival strategy for any plant, but one which extends even further the delay between seed scattering and flower impact. Which seems to be 5 years at least.

Ah well, patience is indeed a virtue. Or as A.A.Milne wrote on this subject in Winnie the Pooh:

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” 

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We’ve again been blessed with meeting some lovely visitors who’ve made a usually long journey to view the garden and flowers this month. As always we’ve gained hugely from meeting them all, and our diverse conversations. It’s also challenged my daffodil cutting and display methods to highlight just how variable they are in colour, size, form and scent. Something many of our visitors are unaware of.

We also had an unusual request from Alex, the owner of the wonderful Siop Botanica in Lampeter to bring one of his favourite Frizzled bantam cockerels to Gelli for a photoshoot. Alex breeds and shows such poultry, (along with his interest in snowdrops and daffodils). He also explained to us that after Mothering Sunday, his next big event would be supplying flowers for customers for Palm Sunday, known as Sul y Blodau (Flowering Sunday) in Welsh. There has been a long standing tradition of Welsh families paying their respects to their deceased friends and relatives on this day, tidying up graves, gravestones and churchyards, and decorating them with flowers for the occasion.

This year we experienced this decoration ourselves, as we travelled a fair way on a foul night of strong winds and lashing rain, to the church of St Cynog, Ystradgynlais for a concert. Needing to use the loo on arrival, we were directed, apologetically, back outside into the rain to the back of the church and past an immaculate row of beautifully flower-decorated gravestones.

The concert was part of the ‘Sanctuary’ tour by the folk musician Steve Knightley, who has formed a recent collaboration with the much younger Handpan maker and player, Daniel Salvatore.

I’d heard a couple of demo YouTubes for this tour, and was mesmerised by the warm relaxing, sounds of the Handpan, and how the pair of musicians complemented each other through a range of musical styles.

This was Knightley and Daniel’s only visit to Wales on this tour, and we were so glad to have made the demanding drive over Brynamman mountain, (the Black mountain we can see from our Shepherd’s Hut) in poor visibility to listen to them both. We were also able to have a fascinating chat with Daniel during the interval about the health benefits of sounds of the ‘right’ frequency, which they discuss a little in the YouTube below, as well as playing more music together.

The role of music and in particular frequencies, is something I’ve become more interested by, given the possible mechanically created sound which large scale wind turbines will push into our currently very quiet, natural sound dominated landscape.

Daniel also introduced us to the work of Nikola Tesla and his (supposed) quote that  “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”. He also mentioned cymatics, a new word to me, and illustrated in the short YouTube below. If sound can do this with particles, flames or liquids, what is it likely to do to the complex membranes, molecules and atoms that make up all of our bodies?

Be challenged, and watch this contemporary music/film production by New Zealand musician Nigel Stanford. And reflect on how many people have viewed this short video, compared with the earlier 2 pieces of music included in this post. How tastes vary!

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I thought I’d mention again my molehill counting/spreading project which has continued at roughly fortnightly intervals since October. The data presented below in 2 different ways, (and thanks to Fiona for transferring it to this format for me) demonstrates firstly what industrious animals they are. But also poses a few questions for which I have no definitive answers.

Given that all the fields are very roughly the same size – even if they have different aspects, the most striking feature is how many more molehills there are in our two (very different) hay meadows. Both of these now have a diverse range of flowering plants in them. The upper one is only intermittently sheep grazed from about late July/August through into mid-December. The lower one is only grazed from about late July to early March, once our hay crop has been removed and most of the orchid seed capsules have ripened.

Does the difference in molehills between meadows confirm a greater mole population in these fields? Not perhaps a stupid question, since maybe the moles might need to work harder if there are fewer worms/invertebrates in these more diverse meadows? Though I suspect that there are in fact more moles in these meadows.

And as a follow on, what causes this roughly three times difference between hay meadows and non-hay meadows which aren’t as florally diverse – though I’m working on this! Is the greater plant diversity, leading to greater below ground invertebrate food availability? Or not

Or does the lack of grazing for a big part of the year, which will limit the amount of nutrient recycling/input from sheep dung and urine have an impact on invertebrate biomass in the hay meadows?

Or does the lack of compaction from grazing hooves during these ‘shut-sheep-out’ months in the hay meadows, favour higher levels of invertebrate populations?

I found a paper which explored this issue and found similar results – molehills were a third as numerous on species poorer, grazed pastures. (Factors influencing molehill distribution in grassland: implications for controlling the damage caused by molehills – G. R. Edwards, M. J. Crawley, M. S. Heard). But it didn’t seem to discover with clarity what the underlying mechanism for such a dramatic difference, was.

My own guess is that flora species diversity, combined with less compaction from year round intermittent grazing will favour invertebrate populations in the hay meadows, and that this would be likely to increase mole population densities, and hence molehill numbers. But I’m possibly completely wrong, and have no scope for further investigation.

One additional comment I would make is that this year, I’ve had a few sessions removing Crocus or daffodil seedlings that have germinated on the narrow mown path through the upper hay meadow. I do this by cutting out a small piece of turf with the seedling in, and transplanting them to a similar sized cut turf hole, just away from the path. In so doing, I’ve noted just how thin the soil is – over shaley stone – in much of this field. Barely an inch of soil in some places, typically only 2 inches elsewhere. Yet in many such small patch removals, I’ve often encountered earthworms – far more frequently than I tend to find when I dig over our deep beds! So my guess is that these meadows are now quite rich in worms, and probably other invertebrate populations. Which is also, no doubt, why these fields are favoured by our visiting migrant woodcock population.

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On the few sunny and warmer days, I’ve continued to film honey bee activity from our on-site colonies. We still have 5 out of 6 active, in a year when there have been records from across the country of very significant colony losses – including in ‘wild’ or free-living colonies. But I have observed an odd phenomenon, I think. The Hay shed hive, which remained apparently lifeless for many weeks into February, when other colonies had shown some bees flying, and which had always been our most active-over winter colony (and which didn’t even respond to me banging it a few times), suddenly became very active.

Shortly after this, our most active colony over this winter and spring, suddenly became completely inactive. I wondered whether the bees in the latter ‘hive’, an insulated old German butter churn which was showing significant signs of physical deterioration, might have scouted/checked out the apparently empty hay shed hive and decided to abscond. In other words to up-sticks and re-locate to a better home, way before the season when any drones have appeared at the hives, or when swarming would normally occur. I shall never know, but if I get a chance I will try to make a short video to capture these changes of activity.

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Finally, I must mention some very special mornings mid-month, when I rose at dawn on 3 consecutive dawns and simply sat and watched the sun rise, and listened to the birds sing for about half an hour, around 5.45 am in light winds and cool temperatures.

A few Canada geese flew down the valley and back again, and the wagtails did some early morning bobbing and preening in our yard. The valley bottom song thrush still sang – though sadly the other, closer bird which I’d recorded many times in February has stopped singing. And disappeared from the scene.

My own simple, beautiful rewards after a long winter, in these troubled times.