New Year's Eve at dusk

New Year twigs & berries from the garden

I have just come back into the house after sitting outside for the final twlight of 2013. Earlier in the afternoon I clambered around in our small orchard squishing mistletoe berries, harvested at Christmas from my parents' Gloucestershire garden, and pressing the sticky seeds into the likeliest-looking nooks and crannies of gnarled apple trees. I still remember my mother arriving to collect me from school one day in about 1979, a young crab-apple tree poking jauntily through the sun-roof of her ageing Triumph Herald. Oh the shame of it! More than 30 years later, that sapling is now a mature and shapely specimen, festooned with mistletoe propagated many moons ago by itinerant thrushes. Now I am using the fruits of those plants in an effort to establish a new colony in my own garden, and though success is far from guaranteed, I take heart from the positive result achieved by neighbours a few miles up the road. They used the same uncomplicated berry-squishing technique and are now the proud parents of a young mistletoe plant growing on one of their apple trees.

The Christmas Cactus I wrote about on 8 September

While pretending to be a Mistle Thrush, I heard the high-pitched trills of Long-tailed Tits coming from the direction of one of our suet feeders. The sibilant, penetrating call of a Treecreeper and the busy 'zeet zeet' of a Goldcrest completed a hat-trick of calls from the same end of the sound spectrum. At around four o'clock, and following their daily pre-sunset winter ritual, squadrons of Jackdaws, nearly 200 in all, flew up the valley towards a roost site whose precise location we have yet to discover. At dusk, I watched a Buzzard, simply a mewing black shape in the gloaming, flap low across the valley to its own roost site, serenaded by two Robins singing against each other – their thin winter song already infused with something richer and more springlike. Finally, three Woodcocks, one at a time, flew fast and silently over the tree tops, leaving their day-time woodland-floor roosts to feast on earthworms in wet fields under cover of darkness. A Tawny Owl hooted. The calendar year is almost done, yet the gardening year has already turned and the days are getting longer. Already, if you look, listen and smell, there are little signs of spring all over the place, of which more tomorrow...

In the meantime, Happy New Year and happy gardening in 2014!