First of May already, difficult to believe. And what a delightful month April was, long, dreamy sunny days, birdsong and lilac-scented air… The plants arrived by the lorry-load, and were decanted by my enthusiastic team of volunteers into a rabbit-proof compound beyond the garden. What an exciting sight, swathes of lovely healthy plants, fresh green ferns, herbaceous perennials bright and full of promise for the season…

With a newly created garden, it’s not always easy to ensure a riot of colour in the initial stages. To help things along, we have enlisted a little help from a remarkably colourful male pheasant. Well in fact there are two and they are often seem strutting around the garden while people are working there. I think they are suitably impressed with things – well they spend plenty of time there. They are melanistic…

The last week has really begun to feel like spring, there is real warmth in the sunlight, and the buds of the cherry plums and willows have burst, giving us a taste of what the season has in store....

A walk in my shirt-sleeves a few mornings ago yielded a blackbird bathing at the edge of Washbrook stream, splashing with abandon, and celandines turning their faces to the morning sun on the bank. Further on a warm sandy…

Well, the landscapers have been on site for just over a month now, and the bones of the garden are beginning to take shape. It has certainly come a long way already from the bare site studded with tree stumps and graced by the ruin of the old tea garden, being quietly consumed by a rampant wisteria! The tea room building is gone now, and on the site an area has been cleared and prepared for the barn that will be built…

It’s morning, not long after sunrise. I wind down the hill from East Bergholt, and disappear down Tunnel Lane to Flatford. Climbing out of the car at the garden, I am struck by the peace of the place, no noise but birdsong... I love the quiet, secret feeling of early morning.  

The sun is just struggling free of the Constable clouds on the horizon, gilding the tops of the trees above. A greater spotted woodpecker…

I open the gate, step into the garden and look around me with a mixture of excitement and trepidation…. You see, I’m the new Project Officer for the Flatford Wildlife Garden-to-be, and this is my first sight of the garden….

The garden is in the grip of winter now, the trees a tracery of twigs against the pale sky, the ground bare and scoured after the weeks of snow cover. The old tea garden roof…