Is it the wet April followed by a fairly dry early May that has brought such change to the limited life that gardeners see? First of all, and probably irrelevantly, the huge oak tree was, for the first time remembered in 40 years, purely yellow in colour for a week or 10 days. That was when the male, dangling catkins appeared in prodigious numbers, perhaps forecasting one of the great crops of acorns of recent years. About 10 days later, its appearance was pale green as the leaves came out. There is many a slip etc., but if luck holds this hugely productive tree should provide enough seed, acorns to cover acres of land. That's the first notable thing in the garden, but the other is less agreeable. For, after our wettest April since the 18th century, the herb section of the inner garden has been plagued as never before by slugs and snails. How that hedgehog mentioned earlier in the week comes to mind. And how a chance was missed a couple of years ago when a small hedgehog, albino almost, but that was probably its mere youth, careered around the lawn and then vanished into a messy corner of spiky trees and piles of leaf and bush debris.
He would be worth his weight in gold now. For, night after night, the herbs, mostly in pots, have to be cleansed of a rolling invasion of snails and slugs. For the first time, too, they are both to be found in the many pots of chives, always before considered too strong in flavour for them. But perhaps it's just because they have made such inroads into the parsley, ordinary and French, the tarragon, the sweet woodruffe and even the thyme. It seemed to come suddenly and perhaps it was foolish to think that the sharp shingle could have deterred them as before. But no poison pellets allowed, for the whole area is glorious with thrush song and the fluting of blackbirds.
By the way, you know the story we hear of a "thrush's anvil", i.e. a stone where the bird energetically bashes the snail, the easier to gobble him up? Well, the thrushes here give great pleasure with their song - always from the topmost of the branches of a convenient cypress - but not one has been seen on snail duty. They and the blackbirds are at an unusual game: the sun on the day on which this is written (May 11th), our Irish Times told us, rose at 5.32 a.m. Why, then, did the blackbird find that sunrise was at 4 a.m. and proceed to waken the neighbourhood with a stream of lovely, but precocious, premature song? And yes, the blackbird that hammered at the windows for some months, after disappearing for some days - maybe on heavy nest duty - is back again, if a little less officious.