On it goes, the seemingly endless cold and damp, frost, snow and hail we're having this winter. The daffodil growers say the season is a month behind schedule, so the borders are looking all rather bare at the moment.
But travelling by train this weekend, I saw one of those wonderful tell-tale signs that the season is on the move. In some hedgerows and gardens, little shrubby trees were festooned with streaks of creamy catkins - the Hazel is coming into flower.
The catkins are the male flowers. They began to form in autumn, when they were hard and small and inconspicuous. But now the tree starts to sense the lengthening days and the catkins expand, until now they are like little dangling lamb's tails (I took the photo in the garden at RSPB Rye Meads (Herts) yesterday). Each catkin has a hundred or so tiny flowers, each capped with a hard bract, below which, if you look closely, you can see the dangling stamens. From these, the Hazel wafts its pollen to drift in the late winter air. Waiting to catch them as they pass are the tiny female flowers, which look like little buds along the stems, each with a tuft of red hairs at the end. (They are not yet open in the photo, because a tree will wait until its male flowers are spent before it opens its female flowers, a nifty device to avoid self-fertilisation).
It is by being wind pollinated that Hazel can flower at this time of year - it just doesn't need to rely on insects to do the job. But wildlife gets its value out of hazel as the season progresses, with various moth caterpillars, sawfly larvae and other insects eating the foliage, birds eating those caterpillars, and then the autumn nuts being a favourite of Wood Mice and Grey Squirrels, and - if you're very lucky - Dormice.
Overall, I think this is a fab plant for the wildlife gardener. It is one of our smallest trees, so is great for a small garden. It can also be inserted in a native hedge, or even grown as a hedge in its own right. And then if it gets too big, you just cut it down the base in winter and it throws up vigorous new shoots the next season - the old art of coppicing. And of course how can you resist a plant that waves such wonderful flags to say that spring is on its way.