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March came and went in a blur. The days are lighter, the clocks have sprung ahead. The garden is edged with a myriad of yellow frilled trumpets framed by luminous jesters’ hats. Iced lemon sherbet bleeds into rich ripe mango hues but mostly the colour is egg yolk. Daffodils, daffs, daffy-down-dillies or daffofrills as I like to call them! Humble spring flowers but their arrival promises so much.

I am slowly realising that I seem to measure the year less by weeks and months and increasingly by flowers. Aching, in January, as I do for the first sight of a beloved clump of snowdrops. Crocus then appear beneath ancient cherries and we are really off! Oh and then there are the helebores, how I love them. Finally, if we are very lucky the first camelia flowers open at the end of the month.

Not so in Cornwall, where we spent the beginning of March. Camelias, magnolias and primroses were all in full resplendant swing.

Caerhays is a much visited and beloved place for me. I long to be there on, or around my birthday. (Long time sufferers of my blog will know that I am a leap year baby, the actual day is, therefore, somewhat nebulous.) To be somewhere enchanted on one’s birthday is to be a harbinger of good things for the entire year to come. Lets just say the last two birthdays have left something to be desired. So this was something of a homecoming and it was quite overwhelmingly beautiful.

A castle by the sea, gardens dripping with cascades of pink flowers, the floor carpeted with petals as though a wedding procession has proceeded you. It truly is a fairytale of a place.

The weather has turned distinctively Dickensian. Last week it was a balmy 19 degrees, we sat outside and ate lunch in wall to wall sunshine. Today it is snowing and blowing a hooley over the hill top. I am watching cherry blossom, barely burst, quivering with cold. The blossom season hasn’t quite begun here. This is due to a combination of our exposed conditions and a herd of deer that visit nightly and feast on the newly planted crab apple trees. They will move onto the wisteria buds next.

Meanwhile, here in the kitchen, my back rests against the aga and I am soaking up the sunshine embodied in these rather lovely daffofrills…