What a difference a day, and one good idea, makes! Yesterday the sky was grey and I was full of gloom, missing my garden and feeling the burden of a too long winter. I realised how much I miss walking down the garden as my favourite way to relieve stress by taking me back to nature and reminding me of all that is not man-made but persists regardless of human concerns. These days the garden does give me that feeling, except right at the end in the woods with the snowdrops, and I need to pick my way through rather a lot of mud and chaos to get there.

But today the sun is shining, albeit rather weakly, and the weather is mild. As I walked up and down, filling the bird feeders, being outside felt like a blessing rather than a test of endurance (no jacket and gloves required!) and I could imagine the arrival of Spring and the way that the garden transforms when the temperature rises.

Yesterday I also had an idea for how to create beauty quickly – a wildflower meadow! The building works have stirred up the ground in the middle section of the garden and the top soil is very thin in places with little organic matter- just the right conditions for a wildflower meadow, where the soil needs to be somewhat poor and the lack of competing grasses allows flowering plants to establish. Basically the builders have done the preliminary work for me by killing the grass and churning up the mud. The conditions of the Somme that lead to the famous poppy fields have been re-created right here in Cambridgeshire. If I get on with it in March we could be looking at a sea of poppies by early Summer, a thought that brightens my mood and quickens my energy again. Now I simply have to work out a plan of where to spread grass seed and where to sow my meadow and work out quantities to buy.