March is here!

Gradually, very gradually, it is starting to look like spring. Here and there, I am still finding late snowdrops quietly continuing to do their thing, like this exquisite, lime-green striped, double-petalled beauty I found recently. Mostly, though, they have given up for the year, turned to small green blobs nurturing their cache of precious seeds and ducked down to give way to the growing army of primroses.

Today was a mixture of sunshine and cloud, but at least it was a break from the insistent rain we have had recently. The mud, however, persists everywhere, making walking on proper footpaths a soggy choice. I decided to keep to the roads. The advantage of that is the close-up view of the hedgerows and verges, which is where I always think spring truly starts.

Some of the blackthorn is in flower now, a strange juxtaposition of the most delicate of tiny pink-white blossom with the most ferocious 5 cm long thorns. In among the living are the skeletons of much older, dead bushes, still forming impenetrable field boundaries, possibly centuries after they last flowered. These seem to attract a special kind of brilliant green lichen, which makes the dead branches more vivid than the living.

In places, the hedgerows are still wearing last autumn's bryony berries. This spontaneous scarlet tinsel had been draped by a meticulous non-human hand into a shiny Un-Christmas decoration. If its purpose was to encourage something to eat the berries and spread the seeds, it had clearly been a failure. Blackbirds and wood pigeons must not like bryony berries, as they could hardly have missed these. Probably, they had found more tempting fare in the local gardens.

Among the yellow and green are flashes of purple - the violets are back in the sunniest spots under the hedges. You have to catch them off-guard to smell their famous, but sickly-sweet scent. If you thrust your nose right into them, you smell almost nothing: instead, you have to sidle up, bend down swiftly and steal a quick sniff before they render your nasal passages senseless. I was standing in several inches of mud, so had to make do with a quick photo instead...when they weren't looking.

At this time of year, anything unusual stands out for us walkers to notice. Today, I found another seashell, this time a mussel, to add to my strange collection of oyster shells gleaned from ploughed fields.

Fungi, too, stand out more than they do in the summer and autumn and remind us that they are aliens - a different life-form from us animals and from the gradually awakening plant world. Some of them are entirely other-worldly: this beautiful earthstar could have fallen from the night sky.