Time to spring into inaction

HARD to believe London was sitting under eight inches of snow only three weeks ago. Now my garden is white once more but this time with snowdrops; purple crocuses are competing with yellow aconites and one of the young male blackbirds has become a sex pest practically overnight - the females are giving him a wide berth. I've got hay fever and so has the cat. We sneeze in unison and in stereo, and I want to rip my itchy eyeballs out of their sockets and rub them down with coarse sandpaper, and I daresay he does too.

Just in case there's any lingering doubt that the season is changing, there are other telltale signs. On sunny Saturday, girls in short bomber jackets and too tight jeans stretched over McDonald's bums were airing muffin tops that have been hidden away all winter. (If younger generations in the West keep eating so much, will they eventually tilt the Earth on its axis?) And my neighbour pressure-cleaned his hideous decking, so that's his gardening done for another year. Spring is in the air.

It's much too early to do anything in the garden or on the allotment, though; the soil is still cold and unless you start fiddling around pinning plastic over it, nothing can be successfully planted yet. So instead I spent four hours on Saturday using the tenon saw and pruning shears on my vicious Mermaid rose-honeysuckle hedge, which had been bashed to the ground by the snow.

It fought back: only full body armour could have saved me from becoming a human pin cushion and even the British Army doesn't have enough of that. After I'd subdued the rose and tied it back up again, I put iodine on the worst of the cuts and headed for the booze.

That snow was pretty but it damaged more than my rose. A huge purple hebe took a hit. It's a crucial plant in my garden, much visited by hover flies, bumblebees, solitary bees and the odd red admiral butterfly. I've had to trim branches off one of the main stems that didn't rise back into place after the snow had sat on it and now it looks as if it's been attacked by a myopic trainee barber. A couple of branches of my rosemary, which isn't far off flowering, were splintered down into the stem region too.

At RHS Wisley the other day whole areas were roped off to visitors; annoying, of course, but at least it was obvious why: the weight of the recent snow had caused huge limbs to splinter off mature trees and crash into public areas. You wouldn't want your child scampering by just as that happened.

Steady, now, I'm sounding like someone from 'elf and safety. There again, it is one of the few growth industries left in this country. I wonder if they're still recruiting?