The white tree above Oakey Grove

I felt very tired after yesterday's journeys and all the catching up with extended family. I started today slowly, which allowed time for the rain to clear and then the wind to pick up speed. In fact it became very gusty with containers flying around the garden at one point this afternoon. It still felt mild out of the wind and there was lots of sunshine as the day wore on. At one point a walker with his dog passed behind the hedge and I noticed the Golden Labrador examining the exit holes of the sett. The dog running in the field is a different one.

I have been waiting to find a good day to blip this view, and it is one of my favourite times of the year when I notice this tree blossoming so vividly in the rather bare landscape at the end of winter. Spring will be soon is the message for me.

I have been trying for several years to identify it, as it does not appear to actually be a Blackthorn as one might presume. I have asked several friends who know more about botany than I do to take a close look. The fruits and seeds are unusual. I wonder whether it was introduced by the badgers having eaten fruit on their wanderings around the back gardens round here and then passed the seed onto the hedgebank, which you can see it is growing on.

The badger sett is very large there, cleverly choosing s a point where the soil is very sandy and easy to burrow into. I often walk there and the tree has several points of growth from the parts of the sett. You can see the extent of the sett this side of the hedge which never becomes ploughed and the cattle who graze the wood and pasture land don't seem to go there either. The rest of the hedgerow doesn't have any other examples of the tree, although the fields have been as they are now for at least three centuries, so one would have expected the tree to spread.

I was standing to take this picture at the bottom of our garden looking south-eastwards towards The Heavens, which is an area above the far woodland. The branches on the right foreground are from the old sycamore tree, which I am standing in the middle of its several trunks. In the foreground you can just see what appear to be twigs, but are in fact the tops of a large oak tree which is growing beside the Lime Brook just down the hull from our garden. The trees in the bushes towards the left are actually on the other side of the stream, where the old Way, the remnants of an ancient holloway, runs down to Bowbridge. Those tree are growing in the garden of the WayHouse, the site of a group of houses, barns and gardens dating from at least 1600, which was finally pulled down in the 1950s.

The trees at the lower right are in Oakey Grove, which straddles another stream running down a side valley from The Heavens, where a big spring gushes out of the ground all year round. From there the valleys rises up to where the badger sett is.

At night, I sometimes hear the badger calls coming from exactly this point across the valleys, but I don't think they are the ones who visit our back garden regularly. I'm hoping to catch a blip of the badgers in the garden when summer arrives. I have photographed already them from my rear windows, but if I am in the cabin they probably won't smell me and I can surprise them at close range.