A lot of people turned out for last Sunday’s Great Comp Snowdrop Fair. Great Comp garden, near Sevenoaks in Kent, is closed during the winter but it does open for just one day in mid February to hold its annual celebration of the snowdrop.

Frances Heron-Maxwell, a suffragette and a great supporter of women’s hockey and cricket, lived at Great Comp for fifty years in the first half of the 20th century. There was a cricket ground and hockey pitch in the grounds and women’s international matches were even played there. Then, in 1957, Eric and Joy Cameron bought the house and dedicated themselves to creating a beautiful garden, known for its rare plants. They set up a charitable trust to care for the house and grounds after their deaths so that we all now have the opportunity to enjoy it.

But no garden looks its best in February and I would like to return to Great Comp later in the year. In a few weeks the fifty types of magnolia that are grown there should be out in flower and that should be a wonderful sight.

It was inevitable that I would came away with a selection of new snowdrops to plant out in the garden. It would have been easy to go completely wild but I did manage some restraint and bought only five, in deference to how expensive these special varieties can be. I did see several for sale that were £75 for a single bulb.

By chatting to the stallholders I also picked up some useful tips on how to successfully grow snowdrops. One suggestion was that I should cover my most precious bulbs with horticultural fleece once they start to die back to stop the narcissus bulb fly (Merodon equestris) getting at them. The female hoverfly will lay her eggs onto the dying vegetation of daffodils, bluebells and snowdrops and the resulting larvae will then burrow down and live off the bulb, often killing it.

Much as I want to encourage hoverflies, this doesn’t extend to giving them complete freedom over my treasured snowdrop varieties. Let them instead run rampant over the hundreds of Spanish bluebells that flourish in the garden here, despite my efforts to pull them all up.

It is frog spawning season, but it has been too cold and windy for them to properly get going yet. We did see a pair looking like swamp monsters in the garden pond which has always struggled with duckweed

I record the date that we first see frogspawn each year and this has ranged from 10th February in 2020 to 8th March in 2018, so there is quite a big window.

The birds of prey have been out in the meadows:

All these birds of prey have a taste for short-tailed field voles, an animal that particularly likes overgrown fields with damp, tussocky grass. A large area of the second meadow that was not cut last autumn seems to be fulfilling this rough-grassland brief nicely:

As well as the grass tussocks there are lots of large ant nests. These are yellow meadow ants, Lasius flavus, that are only ever seen above ground when the winged ants disperse. For the rest of the time they are busy farming underground aphids – the aphids eat the grass roots and the ants eat the honeydew produced by the aphids. The nests can get very large in just one year if the meadow is not cut:

The kestrel is often to be found hovering over this tussocky area:

A visiting son took a video on his phone of a crow brandishing one of our rodents around. Here is a screenshot:

Crows are always very prominent in the meadows:

I am much fonder of them than I am of magpies:

But on the subject of magpies, the bird nesting season has got underway this week with one seen carrying a stick. They will ordinarily build a new nest each spring and I wonder where this year’s will be:

Spring is definitely on its way and a dunnock was singing so beautifully in the sunshine of this morning:

There is still a bitter easterly wind, though.

I finish today with a new project of ours which is to use the Ancient Tree Inventory to track down and visit the ancient trees of East Kent. Many are yew trees planted in churchyards and this week we ticked three of these off.

The ancient yews at Ringwould, Ripple and Thanington Without:

The yew at Ringwould on the left above is thought to be 1,300 years old. It is quite a sight to behold and I find it difficult to get my brain round how much change this tree has witnessed since it was planted in 700AD. Of course, it is also perfectly possible that this already-ancient tree might still be around in another thousand years but it is even more difficult to imagine what things might be like then..