I scanned a fair few sites to find a suitable quote to begin this post, and felt the lines below best summarised the real joys of April 2026 in the garden and landscape of West Wales:

“April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.”

Written by Vita Sackville-West, designer of the renowned garden at Sissinghurst – as well as achieving recognition both as a novelist, poet and long-term lover of Virginia Woolf (whilst being in an ‘open marriage’ with politician, writer and gardener Sir Harold Nicolson). This quote comes from one of the poems in her last collection, ‘The Garden’, published in 1946, and reviewed in a lovely piece on this blog, by Book Ramblings.

I could have used the first lines from the short poem “Home Thoughts from Abroad“, written by Robert Browning a century earlier than Sackville-West’s lines, whilst he was staying in Italy in 1845. But it begins with his longing for the ‘wrong’ country. Read below by Ben Smith:

Sadly, I drew a blank whilst trying to find examples of Welsh poetry celebrating the delights of April – I’m sure there must be some, but they’re probably hidden from me and many others, without easily accessible translations. I’m hoping that Carwyn Graves’ new book ‘Cynhefin, Wisdom from a thousand years of Welsh nature poetry’ and his discussions about this book at upcoming local literary festivals, might shed some light on why this continues to be the case.

It has been a month of much hard physical labour for me, with far too much time spent (for the second month running), on photographing, measuring and recording daffodil flowers, and enjoying the vagaries of the weather which always forms the backdrop to all that we do here. There have indeed been a fair few April showers, but I suspect when the month finishes it will prove to be a better month than most.

Indeed, whilst investigating the origins of the familiar “April showers bring forth May flowers” saying (which at least in our garden is way off the mark – we’ve had flowers aplenty for months now), I discovered that the best chance to have a dry day in London, Edinburgh or Dublin falls on a day in April. Strangely, Cardiff wasn’t mentioned in this list, which I’ve now lost the link to. Though the fact that April 2026 has ended today on another gloriously sunny, dry day, albeit with a strong chilly Easterly wind in a run of 13 dry days, confirms that late April in West Wales is probably as good a bet as any month for enjoying some dry conditions. Here’s my data for the last few years, with maximum and minimum records highlighted, including our PV output which gives an idea of how much light our plants have received.

2014: 136.9mm, 13 dry days  – N/A

2015: 34mm, 22 dry days, PV – 519 KWH inverter output

2016: 108mm, 9 dry days, PV – 394 KWH

2017: 47mm, 20 dry days, PV – 410 KWH

2018: 158mm, 14 dry days, PV – 346 KWH

2019: 94mm, 14 dry days, PV – 416KWH

2020: 50mm, 22 dry days, PV – 498 KWH

2021: 19mm, 20 dry days, PV – 522 KWH

2022: 53mm, 16 dry days, PV – 420 KWH

2023: 111mm, 12 dry days, PV  – 393 KWH.

2024:  225 mm, 8 dry days, PV  – 299.7 KWH – a record high, a record low!

2025: 118.8 mm. 18 dry days, PV – 488.9 KWH.

Despite the familiar rapid explosion of leaves and flowers which always happen as April progresses, I have had made several observations and discoveries which are new to me, this year. Not bad after all these years of looking and seeing what goes on in this one place.

Perhaps most interesting was spotting a flower crab spider, Misumena vatia, poised on the very brightly coloured, past its best, flower of an ‘Irish Fire’ daffodil. Immediately recognisable by both its white colour, and characteristic stationary posture, with front legs spread wide, playing the patient game. Although these spiders can produce silk, and this female (which is typically about 3 times larger than the ground based male) does use silk draglines to aid movement around its habitat, no silken web is involved with catching its prey. It relies on stealth and stillness, waiting for any insect to land close enough to it to be able grab it. Venom is swiftly injected via its hollow, needle-like fangs housed within its chelicerae (jointed jaws). These fangs pierce the prey’s body, allowing complex and rapid acting neurotoxins to travel from specialised glands through a duct at the tip of the fang, paralyzing or killing the prey.

The spider was very aware of my presence and if I moved too close to the flower, it would scuttle, crab like, to hide behind the daffodil’s trumpet. These spiders, like most other species of spiders, possess 8 simple eyes, arranged in 4 pairs spaced around the head, which will give it a very simple view of the world. The central eyes detect colour and shape, while the side eyes are better at detecting movement. The very first photo I took of it, below, shows the shadow of a much larger fly resting on the opposite, sunny side of the flower.

Every day, for about 10 days that I walked past this fading flower, I checked to see if it was still there. And much to my surprise on at least 3 occasions, as I walked past, I could see it holding onto an unfortunate fly, which it was ‘processing’. This struck me as a surprisingly high hit rate, and I wondered why flies were so attracted to this flower – I saw very few resting on other daffodil flowers, as I wandered around this part of the garden, although a spell of warmer dry and sunny weather about 10 days ago did seem to bring an emergence of many solitary bees, of at least 3 different species, which tended to rest up on many of the white perianth daffodils.

At dusk the spider moved to the underside of the trumpet, presumably for greater protection and a possibly slightly warmer and more sheltered location, overnight.

It turns out the spider has an additional trick in its survival strategy armoury. Its white body reflects ultraviolet light, which is the wavelength which many insects like bees and flies are most sensitive to, and often use to find nectaries at the centre of flowers. Thus whereas the white spider body was quite clear to me, insects may find it an irresistible highlight on a flower, as is demonstrated very well in a short, BBC David Attenborough narrated YouTube, which ends badly for the featured honey bee, visiting a (to our eyes) yellow flower. Click below to watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0981wk9#:~:text=The%20UV%20camera%20shows%20how,that%20the%20bee%20cannot%20resist.

Australian researchers tested this theory in an additional way – they painted the flower crab spider with a compound which prevented the UV light reflecting off the spider’s body. The result was that the bees could now detect the spider’s presence on a flower, and avoided visiting any with a (painted) spider resting on them.

A wonderful way to focus one’s mind on the thought that our perception of the wider natural world is very different to many other animals.

Who defines what is ‘reality’? Or mere illusion.

After about 10 days, but before the daffodil flower had completely faded, the spider had disappeared – perhaps itself becoming a meal for one of the many birds that include spiders in their diet. Interestingly, this species of spider has apparently never been recorded from our part of upland Wales before, so I passed the sighting on to our local West Wales Biodiversity Information Centre. I should add that the only other time I’ve seen this species was in late August, 2023 when I saw one in our lower hay meadow atop a Devil’s Bit Scabious flower, emitting silken threads in preparation for possible parachuting away on a breeze to pastures new.

So the crab has left us, just as the crabapples around the garden are beginning to flower as we head into May.

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One seasonal sighting I always look out for is spawning brook lampreys, which I first observed in April 2019, after another prolonged dry spell. I’m including one of my very first few YouTubes, below, for any readers who haven’t witnessed this special event. It’s also worth reading this linked text for details of their extraordinary life cycle which these creatures pass through, before they mass for this final, once only, mating ritual, which ends their 5 or 6 year lives. They’re one of the oldest forms of vertebrate animals on earth and have survived for around 500 million years, to date.

They always seem to spawn around the time of the full moon, in early April, but this year, I missed them. Instead, a walk along the stream after a hot sunny day early in the month, revealed 2 distinct roughly circular patches of cleaned gravel, at the tail end of one of the pools at the upper section of the stream on ‘our’ land. A sure sign that the lampreys had been shifting pebbles to create their spawning redds. I took a few photos – and you’ll probably need to enlarge these images to spot the areas where all the surface silt and debris has been dislodged by the lampreys.

As I took the last photos, my eye was taken by the dark shadow of a small salmonid fry of perhaps 3-4cm length, highlighted on the olive green silt covering on a larger pebble towards the bottom right of the image below, and just beyond the area of one of the disturbed redd zones. Taking that as my cue to examine the images for signs of any other fry, I spotted 2 more – one above each of the redds, which are much less easy to see.

Can you see them?Thanks to information from an experienced fisherman friend of my younger brother, Mark, who kindly asked Gerald for his opinion, it’s likely these are this year’s ‘swim-up’ fry which have recently emerged and grown from their very juvenile stage, sustained by the nutrient in their egg sacs, and ‘swum-up’ to the surface to gulp in some air to fill their juvenile swim bladder, which is a critical structure for most bony fish in aiding their balance, and buoyancy.

When I filmed the spawning lampreys I noticed many caddis fly larvae migrating to the redd after the event – presumably attracted to stray eggs, and I wondered if these fry had been attracted to these areas for the same reason. Or simply that they were indeed less conspicuous against the more varied visual background of the freshly cleaned pebbles.

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The seasonal marker we most enjoy witnessing in early April is the return of our barn swallows. Sometimes it’s a snatched phrase of distinctive chatter that gets us looking skyward. Sometimes it’s the sight of a single bird flying overhead. Often it’s days before we see another.

This year, we spotted the first on April 6th – the day after named Storm Dave had blown through. And even better, we saw two on the same day, and they were both chattering a lot in flight – last year, they seemed silent for much of the year. Better than this, was seeing them fly into the barn and out again on this first day. (top left, above).

Fortunately I’d taken the precaution of wedging the upper barn door open a little using a folded Vetbed. Just enough for the agile swallows to fly in, but limiting access for potential predators. Sadly, the strong Easterly winds in recent days have blown the door wide open, but at this stage of their season, this is unlikely to create issues for them. I hope.

The last week has seen the return of both the garden warbler (which we didn’t hear last year), as well as a cuckoo which sang all the way round the valley to the East, before circuiting round to the North.

The strong winds recently have even challenged the kites which are nesting once again in the valley below.

 

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With the weather due to break soon, I took the opportunity of a warm morning on Sunday to add a super to each of the two honey bee colonies I aim to take honey off. This is the only intervention or opening of any of the ‘hives’ which are dotted around the garden, and in a year which has seen very high winter losses across many parts of the UK, I’m pleased that our bees seem to be generally thriving on being allowed to get on with their lives, as they know best. Whether this will be the year that the much hyped and feared Asian Hornet becomes an extra issue for them, remains to be seen – a nest was found in Wrexham last winter. I guess that more frequent routine opening of honey bee hives during regular inspections will probably mean that hornets will find it easier to use the scent of the colony to track them down. I guess time will tell if my strategy of zero colony opening (until September) keeps ‘our’ colonies safe from hornet predation.

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It’s been one of the best April’s for sightings, and indeed photos of Orange-tip butterflies, Anthocharis cardamines, in and around the garden. We’ve had good weather for them to be active, and more White Honesty, Lunaria annua var. albiflora and Ladies Smock, Cardamine pratensis, than ever in bloom.

Studying  just how marvellously quickly they can fly from one honesty flower to another, made me wonder about both their flight coordination, and indeed their proboscis control.

It turns out that all butterflies which feed from nectar in a flower’s floral tubes have evolved to have smoother sides and indeed profiles to their untra-flexible proboscis. Butterflies which instead feed from material like rotting fruit from which they still have to suck up nutrient fluids have a proboscis which has a much rougher brush like exterior which is much better for sucking up liquid by capillary action.

A group of scientists decided to put this to the test, and discovered if butterflies with the latter type of proboscis were only allowed access to liquid sustenance from a narrow glass flower substitute tube, they couldn’t reach as far down into the tube, and often the proboscis became kinked or stuck in the tube.

(‘Physical adaptations of butterfly proboscises enable feeding from narrow floral tubes’ -Matthew S. Lehnert, Daytona D. Johnson. Jianing Wu, Yu Sun, Rena J. Fonseca, Jan Michels, Jamie S. Shell, Kristen E. Reiter).

2 examples of different species with a smooth proboscis shown to the right, and 2 of species with brush-like anatomy, to the left in the image below.

Flower feeding butterflies suffered no such problems with getting their proboscis stuck when subjected to the glass capillary fake flower experiment!

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Should any readers wish to visit the garden this year, we still have our last 2 weekends available – on May 16th/17th and June 20th/21st. See here for booking details if you’d like to visit us. It’s likely that this will be the last year when we make available dates at this time of the year for individuals/ small groups. Though for groups of between 10 and 20 visitors, we’ll probably still have dates available up to the end of June for 2027. These are always lovely times in the garden, as our Garden Views pages illustrate. It’s just that we need more time for property and garden maintenance as we slow down, and have found the reduced pressure from cutting back on open weekends this year has been a big boon.__

Finally, we enjoyed 3 nights away at Lake Country Hotel, Llangammarch Wells last week, in the middle of the recent sunny spell. (Many thanks to Fiona and her phone for these photos) A highlight was doing a roughly 6 mile walk, straight from the hotel, and climbing steeply the 1,000 feet or so up the escarpment to join the long, circular Eppynt Walk which tracks the edge of this upland plateau which is now part of the extensive Sennybridge Military Training Area. Red warning flags were flying, distant gunshots rang out, but we had 3 hours of sublime walking with not another soul to be seen, and fabulous, if a little hazy views to the North across the beautiful Irfon valley towards the range of the Cambrian mountains.

This is a truly special and under appreciated, wild landscape. Yet it could all be about to change with plans for pylons down this valley and enormous multiple wind turbines proposed for the Cambrian mountains across the valley. The upcoming Senedd elections next week will be pivotal – for a faster rush to “exploit the natural resouces of Wales”, or to call a halt to reassess the irreversible damage from such schemes. Click here to read what Sir Simon Jenkins wrote recently about this issue in The Guardian, or here and here and here to read in forensic detail, from the excellent ‘Jac ‘O The North’ blog, about the tangled and corrupt web which links everyone planning to make a financial killing from this policy. You won’t find this percolates through to MSM! The whole scenario seems to have precious little to do with securing adequate, reliable electricity for use within Wales.

Should you have a vote next week in the Senedd elections, do think hard about how you use it, should you value the very such special places earmarked for industrialisation. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Cofiwch Cymru, (Remember Wales) might begin to appear in rural Wales for many years ahead. For anyone outside Wales, Cofiwch Dryweryn, has become a famous rallying slogan for Welsh nationalism which you can read about here. After the tragedy of the destruction of the Welsh speaking village of Capel Celyn, and its flooding to provide water for Liverpool, the site has at least now, 60 years later, settled into the landscape as the rather beautiful Llyn Celyn.

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Moving swiftly on from this brief political diversion, yesterday saw the 3 remaining A.g.o.g members meet up for one of our regular sessions. By an extraordinary coincidence, Mark had chosen not just a piece of music, but exactly the same piece of music that I’d selected. Given that we each can choose any cultural item to discuss and share with the group, this was more than a weird fluke. I can’t think how improbable it was, even if it was for 11 years running the number one listeners’ choice in the Classic FM Hall of Fame for their favourite piece of classical music. I see that this year, it’s slipped to Number 3!

Mark had chosen it since he’d been to a recent performance by Lampeter Chamber Orchestra, and he played a little bit of a recording featuring Nicola Benedetti as the soloist with a youth orchestra accompanying her.

I’d chosen the same piece, since for most of our walk along the Eppynt Way we were serenaded by multiple ascending skylarks, Alauda arvensis, which took off from the rough moorland grass and ascended into the blue sky, buffeted by a strong Easterly breeze. They kept rising and rising, singing as they went. The song below recorded by Ben Porter in Wales in a similar setting, captures the magic of such an experience:

I’ve heard skylarks many time before, but never so many, and because of the wind, the birds seemed to rise higher without flying around much as in Ben’s video. I decided to stop walking and see just how high one bird flew. In the end I lost sight of it, still directly above me, as it had risen kite-like, angled into the wind and planing ever higher into the sky above. I turned to rejoin Fiona, who hadn’t noticed I’d stopped. She was by then over a hundred yards ahead of me. Apparently they can sing continuously for up to 20 minutes – a remarkable achievement.

Interestingly, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was inspired to compose his piece, The Lark Ascending, by a poem of the same title by George Meredith. Written in 1914 as a duet between violin and piano, he reworked it after its first public performance (delayed until December 1920 at Shirehampton Public Hall – not the most famous of venues) for orchestral accompaniment. Possibly by then influenced by his own experiences of the First World War which left left him inevitably mentally scarred and with impaired hearing.

I shared the recording below by the violinist Tasmin Little, with the spaced out and masked London Mozart players (?) The recorded sound seems to benefit from the acoustic of the lofty church space, of St Giles, Cripplegate Church in London in 2020. Beautiful and strange to reflect now on our own strange times of angst and state control.

I also included another much more contemporary piece of music, again inspired by a few lines from the beautiful poem ‘To A Skylark’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This was composed by the Welsh composer Julie Cooper and is taken from her excellent album Oculus which I mentioned on these pages a few years ago.

Birdsong?

Or Music?

Or Words?

All inspired, and inspiring moments of joy for this Angel of the months, which we now leave behind us for another year.

I’ll also include this link to John Clare’s very different but evocative landscape picture postcard poem of ‘The Skylark’, written around 1835. Also well worth reading.

Will visitors to Wales’ mountains still be able to hear such magic sounds in another 20 years? Does it matter if they can’t? Will other man-made sights and sounds dominate the landscape?

I’ll finish this post with the last 5 verses of Shelley’s poem, written in late 1820, whilst, like Browning, he was living in Italy.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.