Country diary: Daffodils and chiffchaffs are here, the wet months behind us | Virginia Spiers

St Dominic, Tamar Valley: Our wooded enclave is alive again with bursting magnolia and questing bumblebees, while primroses amass on the lanes

Brilliant yellow daffodils and the pale foam of the first fruit tree blossom (cherry plum or myrobalan) draw attention from the lichens and mosses that have thrived in winter’s rain and mild gloom.

At home, in this steep orchard and encroaching woodland, the ground was used as a market garden until the 1950s. Hardy, old fashioned narcissi from those days still flower, many in their original rows and plots. Earliest to emerge are the yellows of double Van Sion (known locally as the Lent lily), Henry Irving with dainty trumpets on long stems, Princep, Helios and Carlton, already fading and past their best, succeeded by Victoria. A woodpecker has drummed for weeks and particularly cheering is the sound of a chiffchaff, returned to this partially wooded enclave.

On a rare day of sunshine, bumblebees seek rosemary’s blue flowers, and a brimstone flits across bright green leaves of poisonous monkshood and the day lilies, nibbled by rabbits. Startling is the increase in the sun’s warmth and height; a tracery of tree shadows is cast across the southern slope, and the old magnolia, recently pruned by the local tree surgeon of a large mossy branch split by the winter gales, is thick with purple-flushed goblets of light. Later, in a dramatic orange sky, the sun sets almost due west, beyond the clothes line, out of use throughout the wet months.

Narrow lanes sport masses of primroses, although the plants along the hedge bottoms are eroded or splattered in mud by passing tractors and trailers. Downhill, in the sheltered valley of the Radland millstream, tattered blooms of Fortune (an orange cupped daffodil) mingle with dog’s mercury, arum (lords-and-ladies) and tarnished hart’s tongue fern. Bluebell leaves and ramsons creep in from old hedge-banks beneath a tangle of slumped branches and uprooted trees, all coated in mosses, polypody ferns and pennywort, perhaps becoming akin to temperate rainforest as this land reverts from previous intensive cultivation.

Outdoor daffodils are no longer grown commercially in the parish, but overlooking the tidal Tamar, the roadside towards Cotehele Quay is edged with sprawling daffodils, thrown out by growers who now specialise in eucalyptus foliage for florists and the production of strawberries, raspberries and cut flowers in polytunnels.

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