Every February I get a little bit more besotted by snowdrops. There are a bewildering 2,500 varieties available in the UK and there is a stamp-collecting part of my brain that urges me on to plant as many as possible of these in the garden.

Last February I started a snowdrop bank, planting some normal and a few more unusual (and therefore expensive) varieties. I particularly like the ones with yellow ovaries which are unfortunately less vigorous, but ‘Madelaine’, shown above, has reappeared on the bank this year and seems to be doing rather well. However, I also planted three Spindlestone Surprise bulbs which have, so far, failed to come up at all.

This week we visited another garden that was open under the National Garden Scheme Snowdrop Festival. The garden was near Sutton Valance, a village south east of Maidstone, so we took the opportunity to visit Sutton Valance Castle whilst we were in the area:

Spring Platt is a garden on the North Downs with beautiful, far-reaching views out over the Kentish Weald:

The garden is surrounded by a large fruit farm growing Gala apples:

Four hundred and fifty varieties of snowdrop grow in the garden, and a lot of these are displayed in this snowdrop theatre:

We enjoyed scrutinising the pots and identifying the ones that we particularly liked. Lulu is certainly a very nice one:

Dave, with his interest in military history, wants to grow Lord Kitchener simply because he likes its name:

The owner of the garden recommended that I tried growing Belvedere Gold, which is apparently one of the easiest, yellow-ovaried varieties to grow:

One of the greenhouses in the garden is dedicated to successfully growing various different citrus trees. Dave was inspired by this, but I feel that we don’t have the necessary skill or dedication and it will all end in tears:

We always come away bursting with ideas when we visit a garden, but reality inevitably begins to bite when we return to our own highly-exposed piece of land perched on dry chalk cliffs.

Back in those very exposed meadows, I am surprised to notice what large feet weasels have:

A wet fox emerges up into the meadows from the cliff:

Badgers don’t seem to mind awful weather and positively relish the rain because this is when the worms come out, but unfortunately our male badger now seems to be blinded in his left eye:

The eye is open but is no longer reflecting light:

Badgers mainly rely on their extremely sensitive sense of smell and their eyesight is pretty poor anyway, so the loss of his eye shouldn’t cause him too many problems. He certainly seems happy enough:

Since this male is now so readily identifiable with only one eye, I have come to realise that there is occasionally a second male around, and he is so much beefier and pugnacious-looking. He actually lumbers from side to side as he walks:

The trail cameras have been affected by condensation recently, but birds of prey have been out and about in the meadows:

On sunny, still days over the winter, little collections of leaves have been floating on the water surface of the wild pond. If you stop and watch them properly, it becomes apparent that the groups of leaves are propelling themselves around:

Over in the wood, I did the annual maintenance tour around the dormouse boxes this week, removing any remaining nesting material, so that they are clean for when the animals reawaken in the spring. At the moment dormice will be hibernating down at ground level where the winter temperatures are more constant.

Every box had signs that birds have been using them for shelter over the cold winter nights:

Box 1 and box 29 both still had old nests in them, but they also had considerable quantities of fresh black droppings indicating that something was currently living on top of the nest:

I ignored this in box 1 and cleared the old nest out. But, in box 29, a pygmy shrew poked its little head up through the leaves just as I was debating with myself what to do. Pygmy shrews are very sensitive and can apparently easily die of fright, so I quickly closed the box back up and retreated. I now know what this mess is and, in future years, will leave such boxes undisturbed until the shrew has finished with it.

Box 12 had a brood of marsh tits in it last spring:

Whilst I was working on the dormouse boxes, Dave was putting up some new bird boxes. He put one up in the vicinity of box 12 in case marsh tits want to nest in the same area this year as well:

This micromoth was beautifully camouflaged on a silver birch trunk:

There is a stand of silver birch in the wood and I love to find evidence of the specialised birch-loving ecosystem that has developed around these trees. This week’s grey birch button moth is part of this, as are the birch polypore and fly agaric fungi that we often see there. More than 200 insects have been recorded in association with silver birch, including 130 species of moth – this means lots of caterpillars around to feed insectivorous birds. There are also two interesting shield bugs, the birch shield bug and the parent bug, and I hope be able to find these feeding on birch catkins in late summer.

I was not pleased to see a heron in the wood this week, catching itself a hibernating frog. I don’t think that there are many frogs in the wood but I had been hoping to get frog spawn nonetheless. This chance may now have gone:

Another long-running battle is who will win occupancy of the tawny nest box. Tawny owls did successfully nest there one year but I’m afraid to say that it usually the squirrels that are victorious. It seems to be going the same way again this year:

The tawny owls have been showing some interest but I am not at all hopeful:

Sparrowhawks have become very fond of taking a bath in this pond, but on occasions they are disappointed:

The overwintering woodcock are still in the wood. They will be leaving to return to Finland and Russia in mid March to early April:

A scarlet elf cup Sarcoscypha austriaca (or perhaps ruby elf cup Sarcoscypha coccinea because you need a microscope to distinguish these two) is a welcome pop of colour on an otherwise drab winter woodland floor:

There are signs that the wood is once again a popular crow roost this winter, but the birds don’t arrive until dusk and this is the only evidence we have of it:

My final photo for today is of a barn owl taken at Sandwich Bay, just up the coast from the meadows, where barn owls and short eared owls have been flying by day this winter and delighting photographers. I went on a group walk last week with the warden of the Sandwich Bay Observatory. We saw a lot and I learned all sorts of things, but unfortunately it was not great weather and we only had distant views of owls on this occasion:

But I hope to return there before the end of winter to have another go.

A link to last February’s post on snowdrops can be found here:

Galanthomania