Apple Oak...and the hollowness there.

Yesterday morning I walked in my early-spring-in-January-confused garden with my camera  - so excited by the difference clean sunlight brings to everything  - including my mood - after endless sullen grey days.

 A  peachy male chaffinch singing high up in a tree at the end of my neighbour's garden. Without its leaves I can't remember what kind of tree it is....maybe a hazel.

Apple tree tear drops.

 I love it that the tree is still surviving even with its canker disease. It gave at least 12 apples last autumn....with that unmistakable garden aroma/flavour which you never get from a shop apple. And I still didn't eat them all before they went sappy and brown spotted in their cardboard box that I was storing them in, in the summer house.

Oak marble gall ( I think) - dripping amber tears.

 There are lots of these hard shelled balls clinging to the thin branches of the shrub oak which is sprouting out of the giant stump that was cut down long before I bought the house. I now know that they are caused by a gall wasp which lays her eggs inside a dormant leaf bud.

I have a dormant acorn in a little pot on the kitchen widow sill...not sure where to plant it when it has germinated....as I'm still in my unsettled transitory state.

However I did watch two men in my kitchen early this morning assemble my new table and chairs - oak veneer - which makes it feel like a proper, permanent, kitchen. ...instead of one with  our old garden furniture in the middle...a bit like camping....for nearly 18 months.

 Single tear drop Hellibore in a pot that I bought with me from our old house...now on the steps by the swimming pool.

Early viburnum - I think. The first  gentle pink in the garden...

and a single primula which has survived the frost ...and the first open snowdrops springing up on the bank of the stream.

 This afternoon just minutes after arriving in a cafe to meet dear friends I learn of the shocking death of the husband of a close friend of another dear friend.

My heart is sore for her...her life changed forever from now on. 

 Like mine has been.

And I'm still here ....surviving like the apple tree with its canker.... like the oak with its hard shelled galls....you can't see what is in the wood of me....and mostly I dare not look...for fear of  dying in the hollowness there...