Springing Forth

Bloody hell (as we say here), but it's been some time since I last checked in. To much to do, so little time (as Cecil Rhodes is reported to have said on his death-bed -- or was it Doctor No to 007 in the novel of the same name?). Anyway, we've been busy, as usual, but not too busy to have time for some preparatory work on the allotment for the coming growing season. On a couple of weekends in January, I used the long loppers to trim the trees along the southern boundary, to ensure that when they start coming back into leaf they won't cast any shade on our crops; and last weekend (although this doesn't strictly fit the "preparing for growing things" matrix) I cleared the blanket weed from the pond, "ready for the frogs to spawn" as I explained to The Wugster. She looked suitably dubious.

But when we went there this afternoon -- an unseasonably warm day, as though spring had arrived a month earlier than usual -- what did we find but the first blob of this year's frogspawn.

We also found -- or, rather saw -- several frogs: one pair clamped together in amplexus, one gravid female lurking on the bottom, and two skinny males waiting (presumably) for darkness to fall and with it the opportunity for the froggy equivalent of getting their rocks off. (This is the one time of the year when you can tell females from males, precisely because the former are so much fatter than the latter. Once the spawning season is over, they're indistinguishable.) Our afternoon tea break was enlivened by the gentle croaking of the males, who seemed not at all perturbed by our company. (Which is unusual -- the frogs in the allotment pond are much less habituated to human oversight than those in our garden pond, and usually stay well out of sight. Perhaps the drive to bonkety-bonk overrides all other considerations.)

Just to add to the unseasonality of the afternoon, on our return to the house as the sun was setting, we noticed that the magnolia stellata in the front garden had opened its first flower. We must clearly hope for No Frosts Whatever in March. In the meantime, photographs appropriate to this post follow!