Blackthorn blossom without a blackthorn winter?

 The first blackthorn aka sloe Prunus spinosa flowers opened in a hedge alongside one of my favourite walks in Weardale last week. This often signals the start of a 'blackthorn winter', a period of intensely cold north-easterly winds, but this year it looks like we might be lucky - the forecast for the next couple of weeks is for milder weather, warm enough for pollinators to be active. Last spring's blackthorn winter led to pollination failure and a very poor crop of sloes locally, and almost complete crop failure for the damson tree in my garden.

The blackthorn in this length of hedgerow is brutally cut back every winter but this is a tree that produces clusters of flower buds on the old wood that survives, that's almost completely coated in lichens. Blackthorn blossom in a carpet of grey and yellow encrusting lichens is a particularly attractive combination.

Wood mouse opportunist

I've finally taken the bird feeders down in the garden, because there's plenty of natural food available now that spring has arrived. That means that this wood mouse, that hid amongst the flower pots near the back door and raced out to pick up the seeds that the birds scattered, will also need to look elsewhere for a free meal.

There are always wood mice in the garden, usually living in the log piles, but they do occasionally find their way indoors. We've caught five in humane traps since Christmas and released them into a hedgerow about a mile away, hoping that they won't find their way back indoors. I wrote about them in the Guardian Country Diary last week.

Luxuriant growth of a lichen in a hedge in the Tunstall valley

 A leafless hawthorn hedge in the Tunstall valley, County Durham, shorn with geometric precision by a tractor-mounted hedge cutter, but decorated with one of the most luxuriant arrays of lichens I’ve ever seen. Much of the hedge was bare, apart from scattered yellow encrustations of common orange lichen Xanthoria parietina, but short lengths were festooned, like overdressed Christmas trees, with countless dangling fronds of farinose cartilage lichen Ramalina farinacea.

This valley offers high quality lichen habitat, thanks to relatively unpolluted North Pennine winds and humidity from Tunstall reservoir, but why had these short lengths of hedge become so gloriously laden with this particular species? I recalled walking here last summer and finding the same sections defoliated by small ermine moth caterpillars that had sheathed twigs in their silken web. By autumn the hedge had begun to recover, but maybe that leaf-loss and interruption in twig growth had given wind-blown lichen spores sufficient opportunity to colonise bare twigs, trapped by that web of sticky silk? It’s tempting to believe that the beauty of this winter hedgerow was due to the arrival of an egg-laying female ermine moth last spring, a serendipitous event in the endless, unpredictable cycle of life.