Returning home from China always has an element of sadness but we know the family have the visas they need to visit this summer and they’re booking flights for mid-July, which doesn’t feel too far away.  We realised what we miss living so far from them at a time when every day brings a new trick when Ed sent us a video this week of Casper’s joy at mastering scooting! 

I was right that spring would be in its full glory by the time we returned to the UK.  How better to spend the time between waking very early on our first jetlagged morning back in London and our train home than with an early walk along the Regent Canal? The cherry blossom is beautiful and Willows and Birch trees are in full leaf.  From the train windows on our way home we can see spring cereal crops greening up, though some fields have a lot of standing water and are looking very patchy after weeks of rain and Storm Kathleen last weekend. Many farmers are seriously worried about what the rain is going to do to yields and others still have cattle indoors because their pastureland is too wet to use, yet people still think climate change is a problem faced largely by other people, in less temperate parts of the world, and not something we really need to be worrying about….

I try not to bury my head in the sand and am well aware that spring is starting earlier every year. The Joint Nature Conservation Council (JNCC) produce an annual Spring Index, based on the mean observation date of four biological events in a big Citizen Science project across the UK (The Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar); the dates of first flowering of hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), the first recorded flight of an orange-tip butterfly (Anthocharis cardamines), and the first sighting of a swallow (Hirundo rustica).  The average day after 31 December when all four events are recorded gives the Spring Index value. Although there is a lot of variability year on year this shows that, since 1998, spring has occurred around 8.7 days earlier than during the period 1891 to 1947. This change is strongly linked to warmer temperatures in March and April and the index advances more rapidly when the mean temperature is at or above seven Celsius, as the figure below shows. We can only expect spring to come earlier and earlier as the planet warms. 

It’s hard not to look forward to the coming of spring but the fact that all species don’t respond to temperature increases in the same way is likely to cause many problems; insects may emerge out of synchrony with the spring flowers which depend on them for pollination services or the nestlings which rely on them for food and plants become more vulnerable to extreme events such as late frosts. Complex food webs face serious disruption. Early spider orchids growing in the UK, pollinated by solitary mining bees, are just one example.

The pleasure that comes from connecting with nature is one way of keeping myself grounded, though, in a time with so much to worry about. On my early morning run on Thursday I saw my first Yellowhammer of the year and lots of Dandelions, Daisies and Greater stitchwort in flower, and rowing on Saturday morning I spotted the same sort of Grey heron on the river as I’d seen on the Rover Shahe at the start of the week! A charm of Goldfinches flitting across the path on my way home was the icing on the cake.

In the garden everything is green. The Willow tree is that beautiful, fresh shade of spring green before the leaves start to build up protective tannins, the buds are bursting on my own small Ginkgo tree and the blue and white Alpine Clematis is rampaging through the Holly and Apple trees. The wild Primroses have spread further this year bringing pops of lemony yellow to many parts of the garden and a few Cowslips are appearing in the grass.

Time in the allotment this week has been very limited as we came back to a new kitchen in need of painting. The autumn raspberries are sprouting new leaves on last year’s canes so I desperately need to get those cut back.  There are flowers on the plum tree and my gooseberry bushes and I’ve picked rhubarb for crumble and had a lesson from Aziza about how to use Cardoon leaves in my cooking.

I finished reading both Dream Town by David Baldacci and The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashwai, with plenty of reading time whilst travelling. Dream Town is an entertaining detective novel set in 1950s Los Angeles, with a protagonist who reminds me a little of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.   The Food Detectives is an altogether more gentle but intriguing set of stories about a father and daughter who recreate bespoke dishes with particular significance for their customers – a lovely read even for someone like me who knows little about Japanese food.