20. Primroses

Cold rain-showers raced in from the ocean today, one after another, with an occasional gleam of sunshine in between. A day to hunch into a warm coat, turn up the collar and put on a woolly hat. Yet changes are happening daily, and at an amazing pace. Today, the first primroses! I spotted their distinctive pale yellow under the hazel trees at the back of the fairy fort, and walked over to find several large clump of flowers growing in the grass. These are truly wild primroses in their natural habitat, though they would grace any garden.

Primroses look delicate, fragile even, with thin petals on slender pink stems, quite different from the robust flowers of the daffodils. Yet here they are, pushing aside the grass, open and lovely in both rain and sunshine as if to say 'Grab the moment, there is no need to wait - be like us and let your spirit shine out now'.

A gleam of pale yellow under the hazel trees

19. Grape hyacinth

A vibrant blue catches my eye. The grape hyacinths are in bloom, nestling under the daffodils on the steps of the Imbolc garden. Until now spring has been a weaving of yellows and pale green; now threads of blue and purple add the colours of sea and sky.

Grape hyacinths, whose blooms are meant to look like bunches of grapes, remind me of my grandmother. They were her favourite spring flower in her traditional English garden, and she grew them along a short path which she rather grandly called the Spring Walk. She would have been fascinated by Brigit's Garden - and, most of all, by the stone walls.

Living here in the West of Ireland we take stone for granted as it is visible everywhere. In my grandmother's Sussex garden, now my sister's, there is no real stone. There, boundaries are

marked with hedges not walls, and the only hard materials are small flints dug from the nearby chalk.

I  imagine my grandmother strolling through  Brigit's Garden, entranced by the splashes of yellow and green against grey stone, and by the sheer Irishness of it all. And then, perhaps, a vibrant blue would catch her eye too and she would bend down, smiling, greeting the grape hyacinths like an old friend encountered far from home.

18. Dandelion - eclipse and equinox

An awe-inspiring day, as we experienced a solar eclipse on the day of the spring equinox. The eclipse felt powerful and elemental, and we had a stunning view through wispy cloud as the moon moved across the sun.

Not the moon, but a partial eclipse of the sun at 9.30am

Later, the sun shone and the shadow on the giant sundial moved along the equinox line, marking this special moment when the whole planet experiences equal night and day.

In the Northern Hemisphere we now leave the dark behind and move into the light half of the year. This is a special time of new life and renewal, bursting buds and rising energy. Easter will follow soon, on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the equinox.

A clock for each month & the straight line for the equinoxes

I am at heart a summer person, and I love the thought of the growing sunlight, green trees and long summer evenings to come.

I looked for a natural object that represented the sun and saw it almost immediately - one of the first dandelions of the year, a beautiful yellow sunburst in the grass at my feet.

17. Shamrock and heather

In honour of St Patrick's Day I went looking for shamrock. I knew where to look, as white clover grows amongst the thyme on the Lughnasa mounds - and shamrock, of course, is not a separate species but young clover, or seamróg in Irish. It was one of those days when everyone smiles: blue sky, warm sun, birds singing and the feeling that the energy of spring is now unstoppable.  


I found my little piece of shamrock, but what really caught my attention was the loud buzzing of bumblebees feeding on the purple flowers of spring heather growing nearby. There were four, five, six or more bees bumbling about, soaking up the sunshine and the early nectar.

Look closely...

Bees and honey were revered in Celtic tradition, and honey has a long tradition of being fermented to make mead, a drink associated with heroes and the gods. Early Christian monasteries like Brigit's in Kildare would have kept bees for honey and mead.

Standing in the Garden with heather and shamrock in my hand I felt like a bumblebee - energised by the spring sun and foraging for the sweetness of life.

...and spot the bumblebee

16. The robin's perch

The Garden seemed to be full of robins today, the air bright with song as the birds establish their territories. I spotted this one

The robin let me come closer...

in the old hawthorn by the lochán. It  let me come closer and closer until I was just a few feet away.

I wanted a natural object that reminded me of the robin, so I gently broke off the twig it had been sitting on - a complex, gnarled piece of hawthorn,  decorated with lichen like tiny, grey-green coral.

...and closer

To a human ear the song of the male robin is musical and lovely. To the female robin it is an invitation, an advertisement of the qualities of a potential mate. But to another male the song is an aggressive message:  'This is my place, keep off!'. The 'why' and 'how' of birdsong is fascinating.

Today, however, I am just absorbed in the moment, listening to the robin's song, soaking it up as balm to the soul.

15. Daisies

The common daisy or nóinín

Something small and white sparkled on the Earth Woman's cheek. I walked closer to take a look and found the first daisies of the year. So simple and so lovely, evoking memories of making daisy chains as a girl.

Daisies bring the sense of spring gathering energy, and the first whisper that summer is not far away. What else is there to say other than 'I love daisies'?

Earth Woman rests in the spring sunshine

14. Alder with catkins

Alder trees like damp ground and grow happily round the lochán.

The lochán today - a rich habitat

I am proud of this little lake as we created it. It is now a wonderful habitat for newts, dragonflies, damselflies and many other insects, birds, bats - and alder trees. When we bought the land in 1999 the area was a damp spot in a big grassy meadow, close to a small field drain that disappeared down a swallow-hole under the esker bank.

With the help of Gordon D'Arcy, naturalist, engineer and artist - such a great combination of skills! - we marked out a natural shape and began to excavate in 2002. As the digger worked, water bubbled up from natural underground springs and the lochán has never dried out. For the first few years, visiting friends and volunteers were frequently dispatched onto the water in a rubber dinghy with nets to fish out blanket weed algae, but now water plants and a small reed bed have developed as natural filters and keep the water clean. School groups fish for bugs here, visitors relax looking at the water, and the lochán hums with life.

Alder with male (long) and female (round) catkins

Alder is a prolific seeder and grows so well here that each year we have to remove hundreds of seedlings to keep the lochán open and sunny. Alder has fatter, browner catkins than hazel and distinctive female catkins like small fir cones, still visible from last year. In Celtic mythology alder is associated with battle and death, probably because of its red sap. Huge Bronze Age shields made of alder have been found preserved in bogs. But here, by the lochán, the trees looks peaceful and full of life.

The lochán under construction in 2002

13. Daffodil flower

Daffodils are in flower at last! The unusually cold spring has slowed them down so they are blooming later than usual, but nothing stops them.

Daffodils in the Bealtaine garden

Last night it snowed again, and a pristine whiteness greeted me in the Garden this morning. In my first post of this blog I wrote about the resilience of daffodil shoots, and the same holds true for the flowers. Looking closely at a daffodil flower you see delicate colours and pretty shapes, and catch a beautiful scent - but this is a tough survivor. Like many woodland plants it has a small window of opportunity to bloom and photosynthesise before the leaves develop on the trees and block out the sun. Evolution has done its job well, and the daffodil makes the most of early spring.

Today the waxy blooms and leaves had shrugged off the heavy, wet snow and looked radiant and wonderful under a bright blue sky. To me, daffodils symbolise the courage to push through harsh or difficult times, knowing that beauty and joy will blossom again.

Daffodil shoots in the morning snow

12. Seabird feather

Today I walked not in the Garden but on the Connemara shore near where I live, just a few miles from Brigit's Garden. A gale was howling across Galway Bay from the Atlantic, the sea grey-green and white, wild and loud. Waves crashed in on a short stretch of sand to my right, but where I stood a group of rocks created a calmer area of water. I looked down and a feather floated right to my feet. It is a beautiful thing, sleek and black, a wing feather that speaks of the streamlined elegance of a seabird, possibly a cormorant.

A few days ago I looked for a feather in the woodland and did not find one, here on the shore one appears, unbidden. It reminds me that to understand nature in the Garden we need to be aware of its location here on the West coast on the margins of Europe, in an area almost surrounded on three sides by the ocean. So many aspects of the Garden, like the rest of Connemara, are shaped by the dominant presence of the Atlantic: its climate, the landscape itself and the history of its human inhabitants. It is a powerful and sometimes awe-inspiring presence, and I am happy that a sense of the sea is carried by the feather into my collection of natural objects.