Through the winter I went out every day to get my fix of nature. Now, though, it’s practically breaking into the house. I need only open the bedroom curtains. Beneath me, as happens every spring, the neighbour’s cherry plum is having its moment in the spotlight. Some years, in fact most, this is a fleeting glimpse of pink that disappears in heavy rain, or even hail, but this year it has been a glorious and protracted performance. Blossom extended across its canopy and has stayed there, much to the excitement of the birds and insects. My job is simply to hang out of the window and watch.
Spring is quite the production. The theatre has been vacated for months, but now the actors are returning, taking up their old marks and delivering their familiar lines. The dunnock is front of stage, hopping around under the cherry plum; the wren is in its familiar spot centre-third, firing off its automatic rattle. Upstage is the chorus: coal tits, nuthatches, wood pigeons gathering in the dead alder, and the blackbird outsinging them all with his slow, round melody. Waiting in the wings, I pray, is the song thrush, in recent years an intermittent presence. And it’s the cherry plum that raises the curtain.
Bees instinctively prefer flowers of blue and yellow, and when the pulmonaria gets going in beds nearby, that’s where they go. For now, though, I can bee-watch from above as they congregate on the pink blossom. Scanning the flowers through binoculars, I spot a honeybee, then a buff-tailed bumblebee, with its narrow yellowish stripes – a thin one just behind the head and a wider band just beyond the gap between thorax and abdomen.
This year, though, there’s a new star. Tree bumblebees began the century with a foothold on the south coast and have spread north. Now my garden has one, clinging upside down momentarily to a pink blossom. It fills my glasses, like a furry, ginger-brown bear hanging from a chandelier, before it exits, stage left.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
