Notes from a Quiet Garden

April 2023

The equinox has passed, the clocks have gone forward. Spring is officially here, though at an altitude of 1100 metres, signs of it are slower to emerge than in places lower down. In Sarria, for instance, 40 kilometres farther along the Camino Frances at a tenth the altitude of La Laguna, there are already early roses, whereas mine are just putting forth leaves.

Still, the promise of the season is evident. Tiny aconites and snowdrops nod in the angles where granite walls meet, and I note that last year’s deep blue muscari have established themselves in new situations that owe nothing to any effort of mine. They join the irrepressible calendulas - hundreds of them, all the offspring of a single plant given to me by a neighbour – in bringing dashes of bright colour to a garden that is still largely clad in wintry brown.

Another charmer is the red-stemmed dogwood (cornus sibericus), cheerily coming into leaf against the stone wall outside my kitchen, but what is really splendid just now is my sole star magnolia, decked in white blossom like an old-fashioned bride. This little tree, whose furry grey buds have been biding their time since December, seems to possess an innate wisdom that prevents it from flowering too soon. I wish I could say the same of the narcissi, true harbingers of spring joy, but soon blown flat by the westerly gales.

It’s too early, at this elevation, to plant seeds in the open ground of the vegetable plot before mid-May, but one can plan. I always try to include something I’ve never grown before, partly for fun and partly to have something interesting to offer my neighbours, who are generous to a fault in sharing their produce. Since I can’t rival their immense and perfect specimens, I resort to novelty, and so far have introduced them to parsnips, shallots, black tomatoes and oak-leaf lettuce. This year it will be a variety of chard called ‘Bright lights’, a riot of red and yellow stems with variegated leaves that look as good on the platter as they do in the plot.

March 2023

In much of Europe, late February or early March always brings a week or so of warm, sunny weather that feels more like May. These were the classical Mediterranean world’s ‘halcyon days’, when kingfishers could nest undisturbed by winter storms, thanks to the protection of Zeus. A similar week in autumn is widely known as ‘St Martin’s summer’ after the compassionate saint who divided his cloak with a beggar and whose feast day falls on 11 November. The late winter spell of balmy weather appears to have no such saintly association, yet it is a recognised annual weather phenomenon. Elsewhere in Spain it is un veranillo, in Galicia, un pequeno verán, and here, in the dialect of the area around O Cebreiro, it’s un pequeno vrau: a ‘little summer’, which is regarded as very much its own season, just as England’s ‘midwinter-spring’ was to T.S. Eliot.

There is a sudden sense that new life is stirring. Even as the snow melts under a cloudless sky, green hellebores nod in the cold wind and the first tiny wild daffodils emerge along the roadsides. Magpies wage noisy, cackling love and war (and yet again I ask myself how anyone, even a medieval Galician king, could name a daughter ‘Urraca’ in homage to this raucous bird). More pleasing to the ear is the rush of water along the irrigation channel that runs through La Laguna. The water comes from a pure mountain spring that has never been known to fail, and the system by which my neighbours divert it to their respective fields on specific days of the week, using only a simple hoe, dates from time immemorial.

Opening the sluices to let this snowmelt-laden channel enrich the slopes is only one of the tasks proper to the pequeno vrau. Tractors rumble past, dragging tanks of fertilising purín (cow urine) that will be tipped down the hillsides in a precipitous gush. Stalls are cleared and manure spread. After weeks in the barn, cattle are turned out to pasture and gallop past my house, jumping and frolicking like children let out of school – a surprising and comical sight for those who’ve never considered that cows might have a sense of fun. The hamlet’s low granite walls are suddenly warm enough for us to bask on, like lizards. The shouted greeting now is ‘Warmer out than in, eh?’, since our stone houses hold the chill of winter and our otherwise faithful chimneys smoke us out. For the length of the vrau, we fling open our doors each morning to let in the warmth.

Then, as quickly as they came, the halcyon days are over and March turns its back on the promptings of spring. In a rough year, the Atlantic gales return, tearing slates from roofs and forcing us indoors to stoke up our woodstoves. They retreat, finally, in the face of the greater force that is spring itself. This time it’s for real, casting the famous ‘green haze’ over the landscape, and decking the wild plum and cherry trees with blossom as far as the eye can see.