I HAVE JUST BEEN BROUGHT A CUP OF TEA

It is overcast, chilly and very still in the garden this morning - nothing is moving apart from birds - Mrs Pheas. is ambling up into the daffodils on the high banking. She nests every year in the rhododendrons at the top.

The big bud is Madame Lefevre

- first tulip and a glory when open in the sun, scarlet and black centre - what sun? My daughter tells me they are basking in Herefordshire.

Last night we had a lot of tuwhitting but not much tuwhooing so the tawny owls are just starting to get their act together.

I have made a gate (of sorts) for the rabbit proof pen - a bit of a cobbled job but it works. and R has been weeding and brambling like a trooper, plugging away and her only pay was a cup of tea.

Every day, if possible, I trundle down to the horse manure mountain in the field below the house and load up. It is a long slog back up the hill but the stuff is magnificent and have now done the rhubarb as well as the roses.

I have put out the last of the small oriental poppies and nearly forgot to water them, blocked another leak from the pond before the frog spawn dried and tinkered.

After a Witherslack walk in birdsong we were out buying again - cannot resist sometimes - to wonderful Halecat Nurseries - bought Mrs Bradshaw again (the

geum), a blue blue sea holly,

an even bluer delphinium (now with bottomless flowerpot over it - with a band of copper to try and keep away the molluscs) and, for R, the brief but abundant flowering Rose Albertine to go up the hedge by her writing shed.

I stand in the garden and all I can hear are the birds, the lambs and water tumbling in our stream.

It is time to shift manure again.