The flower buds in the magnolia clump near the car park at Google 51-24-319 0-20-382 were starting to swell. I note in passing that you get a good view of the Palace gardens on Google Earth.
The bulbs were starting to show, and we found two daffodils, some winter aconites and some clumps of snowdrops - under bushes in this last case - in flower. Some crocuses in bud. Plus a modest amount of forsythia.
Long pond looking good in the bright morning sunlight.
Fat carp all present and correct in the round pond in the privy garden, munching their way through the various gobbets of bread floating on the surface of the water. Rather scary mouth action as they grabbed the gobbets.
A good show of purple dwarf cyclamen along the fairly recently refurbished southern boundary to the eastern sunken garden.
Then yesterday a return to the Horton Clockwise for my morning constitutional. Accompanied a squirrel for about 20 yards as it ran through the western hedge of Horton Lane. I suppose he (or she) was trying to get away from me, but whatever he was up to he gave up and dropped down and away into the golf course after the 20 yards.
I then found signs of light hedge trimming, high and not the sort of mess you would get from a flail. There were deep wavering ruts in the strip of grass between the walking path and the cycling path, not the sort of ruts you would get from any council flavoured vehicle which I could bring to mind. Perhaps the people from the nearby equestrian centre had done a bit of free-lance pruning? The height of which would be consistent with wanting to keep stray bits of hedge out of the faces of riders. In any event, someone had made a right mess of the grass strip and I do not suppose that he or she will be back with a rake to tidy up.
The only tweet was a robin - far and away the most common small bird to be seen & identified hereabouts, in part because of the easy identification.
No visible action on Jungle Island (see 29th December last).
In our own garden, while the daffodils are pushing up, neither snowdrops nor winter aconites are to be seen in the new daffodil bed, but the older snowdrops on the way to the compost heap are showing through and clumps of cuckoo pint (arum maculatum) and celandine (ranunculus ficaria) are pushing up in the same general area. Couldn't at first think why the cuckoo pint should earn the descriptor maculatum, meaning stained, but I now have a dim memory of the leaves acquiring black spots as they mature. Shall have to keep an eye out.
And as thought for the day, I offer King Mausolus, a Greek flavoured king from what is now the Ionic coast of Turkey, who reigned a little before Alexander the Great got cracking, of whom there is a large statue (which I must go and see) in the British Museum and who gave his name to the mausoleums that we have now, that for himself and his widow being the very first such. Immortality of a sort in that his name is in common parlance, but with the catch that we do not often know that it is his name. I don't think Achilles would have thought this immortality of a sort worth striving for: one's name should be in peoples' mouths, but they have to know why, they have to know that one was a hero for it to count. All this from a fine pick-me-up from somewhere, an old fashioned history of Greece by one J. B. Bury. A snip at £1.50, in a handy travelling size and including fold out coloured maps.
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