Two swans, necks outstretched, fly low over the stubble. It’s sunset. I’m driving home from Stamford, heading north along the A16 just outside Spalding. I watch the birds glide effortlessly through the air. They give the impression the world beneath is known to them. That the dykes and ditches and hares and sea shrimps are signposts they’d follow as when a nomad follows the stars. A little further on where the sign says ‘Welcome to Historic Spalding’ they veer sharply left in order to bypass the factories and the power station. Out over the fields and the sheep and the quiet country lanes. Across the land and the willow-tops to the shelter of the delph. Two roads, theirs and mine. One destination, I think: Home.

To my mind spring has the capacity to evoke Home more than any other season. It’s a time of change and while change may lead to feelings of alienation it also emphatically draws us in. This is Spring! The quality of the light brightens, the weather warms, living things put on the mantle of life. We feel engaged and caught up in the spring-stream. Our sense of indentification with our home, the earth, is renewed.

For sure, Woodlands has woken from winter slumber. The warm soil is ripe for seed. Barley, oats, spring beans have been drilled. Broccoli plants tilt skywards; carrot seedlings, whisker-thin, form a thin green line, west towards the cottage. Among, beside, above, undismayed by scarecrow or flag (or clapping hands and shouts) gaggles of pigeon, pheasant, mistlethrush bob-bob and thread their way across the face of the land.

Ring out the changes! Charlie’s ploughed Simpson’s Field, turning it over in just one afternoon. He’s buried the aftermath of cabbage and cauliflower, (dock and thistle), with the silver shears of his plough. Walking the field you can sense how, ten inches down, the worms are turning the trash into humus, how their delighted wriggles form miniature drainage channels for summer downpours. See how the plough follows the serpentine field edge. This marks the line of an old creek. Simpson’s has regained a semblance of its past. As part of the Wash.

Spring: now the landscape changes with newly-planted trees as well as crops. Three new woods at Woodlands this year: oak, ash, birch, beech and chestnut. As with the plough the woodland edge follows the curves of the dykes and waterways. Rows of small trees sit two and a half metres apart, the distance needed to allow easy mowing with a miniature tractor. I’ve grown to adore birch. So pretty, they grow fast and have the effect of providing shelter for slower growing trees. They’re sometimes called ‘nurse trees’. They’re fun too. You can swing on the young saplings

                           He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, 
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground

                                                             from Birches, Robert Frost