Yesterday I popped over to the canteen at the local artists’ studios to celebrate a potter's 50th birthday. Chris lent me a writing handbook by Ursula Le Guin, and offered sandwiches of homemade wild garlic pesto, pickled cucumber, spinach, and cambozola cheese on sourdough bread. There was triple-layered red velvet cake and champagne homebrewed from grapes grown in a neighbour's polytunnel. Maybe the champagne was fairy juice; it was so strong, the artists put down their sharp tools and measuring tapes and scattered homewards for afternoon naps.

Beside the canteen I identified hairy bittercress (Irish: Searbh-bhiolar globach), lover of bare ground, walls, and path-sides, with tiny white flowers, unassuming and humble in their patch of leaves. Apparently excellent in salads and pestos; picked and washed, they would have been a delish addition to my sandwich. However, according to the Royal Horticultural Society, they are a weed, to "remove wherever seen," which I report to my friends, who scoff and guffaw.

In the woods: lesser celandine, primroses, golden saxifrage, wood anemones, dandelions, daisies, wild garlic. In fields and hedgerows across county and country: blackthorn (also sloe, wild plum, and wishing thorn)—profuse white blossoms on leafless black branches. Flying above our yard, gloom or shine: dozens of house martins.

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