Looking for spring

Bramble leaves were purple with cold. Black fungi and yellow lichen crept over bare branches. A dead badger lay by the roadside and debris from fast-food outlets littered the verges. Overhead a buzzard was being mobbed by a crow – a macabre aerial ballet. The clear chalk stream of the River Frome was flowing fast under the bridge and a skein of mallards flew sketchily across the grey sky.

It was a gloopy sort of day. A curtain of thick grey fog hung over Portesham Hill. The road was covered in a slippery layer of stinking mud. Hedges had been flailed creating raw splinters of wood that poked through the mist. I was looking for signs of spring, but, apart from a celandine, some catkins and an isolated patch of fragile white blossom, everything was still steeped in winter gloom.

However, in my sister’s garden the surface of the pond was corrugated with clumps of frogspawn. It was all clustered on the shaded side of the water – a myriad of eyeballs , small black pupils unseeing, but warding off predators. I remembered the nature table at school and the excitement of watching tadpoles develop. I was fascinated by the change in the frogspawn from black dots to squiggles, and loved drawing the different stages in pencil on sugar paper, revelling in the word ‘metamorphosis’ which seemed to sum up for me the mysteries and excitement of the natural world.

When I was nine our class was occasionally taken down the road to a long sloping garden owned by an elderly lady called Mrs Fiddler. She kindly allowed the children to come and play on the grass in fine weather. At the top of the garden was a pond which drew me into forbidden territory. I would hide in the grass next to the water, watching the newts and other wildlife. In the spring I’d scoop a lump of frogspawn into a jam jar and smuggle it back to school, keeping it in my desk. I took it home at the end of the day and tipped the gelatinous soup into a large glass bowl. I once caught a great crested newt and somehow got it home. It looked newly painted with orange and black splodges on its belly, but it vanished overnight from its fruit bowl. I searched guiltily for a corpse for days but found no trace of it.

Today I lifted a lump of the rubbery jelly from my sister’s pond and drove home carefully with it in a washing-up bowl. All these years later, yet I can’t wait to see my frogspawn begin to turn into froglets.

Depths of Dorset

Alliums

Pucketts wood

horse chestnut seedling

Arum maculatum

Wessex Way

eaten by rabbits

Pucketts Wood

rabbit hole

stinkhorn

vipers bugloss

water beetles

cuckoo pint

wild garlic

wild garlic

plantain

selfheal

yellow archangel

primroses and bluebells

I set off early for Stoke Water near Beaminster where a friend has a pond full of newts and tadpoles. She said the surface of the water was seething – I imagined a sort of newt soup and couldn’t wait to take photos. Unfortunately I had woken with conjunctivitis and the day, already grey, seemed even more indistinct viewed through my watering eyes.

Low cloud on the hills softened the outlines of trees suggesting reflections rather than hard reality. It began to drizzle as I drove down through the green tunnels of the hollow-ways, a froth of white cow parsley bubbling on the verges and swathes of amethyst bluebells adding to the illusion of being under water.

The pond’s surface was grey. The only signs of life were a few water beetles sculling around. It was too cold for the newts and tadpoles to cavort about – they were probably hiding deep down. So we went for a walk across the fields and through Pucketts Wood (owned by the Woodland Trust).

Cuckoo Pint was nodding pink-bonneted heads above the lush grass in the field. On the edge of the stream the spiky white flowers of Wild Garlic shone out from dark green leaves and the scent was mouth-watering. As we walked through the next field, our boots knocked puffs of smoking pollen from Plantain.

Pucketts Wood is in a river valley and consists predominantly of tall thin oak and ash trees, not yet in leaf. At the foot of the pale trunks, the small mauve flowers of Selfheal (Prunella vulgaris) clustered. Further on in the grassy open spaces, Vipers Bugloss and Yellow Archangel flourished along with primroses and bluebells. Hollowed halves of acorns lay among the leaf litter – possibly left by a dormouse. Rabbit holes and mouse holes were everywhere. The newly shooting Lords and Ladies (Arum maculatum) had been mostly chewed off, probably by rabbits. A stinkhorn fungus lay like a shed skin beside the path.

We came to a wooden signpost and I realised we were crossing the Wessex Ridgeway which leads to Lyme Regis. We stopped to photograph a tiny chestnut tree planted by my grandson. A row of spear-headed alliums edged the path and I felt a shiver at the thought of the legions of feet which had trodden this ancient way.