Late spring flowers and Allium 'Purple Sensation'

Now even the oaks are fully in leaf, our valley is a verdant paradise - the fields are dotted with fragrant pheasant’s eye narcissi and pink spires of spotted orchids, the verges froth with wild flowers – bugle, bluebells and stitchwort, buttercups, dandelions and wild strawberry.

The ornamental garden is at its most fresh and colourful too. A red-leaved japanese acer contrasts well with white wisteria, blue ceanothus and yellow Azara serrata. The latter shrub is invaluable for the delicious, heady scent of its pompom flowers that permeates the entire pond garden.

Another signature plant of the season is Allium x hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’. An inedible member of the allium family, that fortunately lacks an onion or garlic scent, I introduced a handful of the bulbs into a border eight years ago. They obviously loved the heavy clay, seeding prolifically so the front garden is now packed with glorious purple spheres, a great companion for both late tulips as they finish and hardy geraniums and irises just coming into flower. An added bonus, they are a great favourite with many different bees and the first butterflies of the year – if you don’t already grow them and have a sunny patch with moisture-retentive soil, why not place an order and plant some in the autumn?

A sheep that moults

Manx Loughton is proving to be my favourite breed of sheep. Unchanged since the days of the Vikings, they are far from the big, white commercial bruisers that spring to most people’s minds - our two girls are small and brown, but what we lose in terms of fast-fattening productivity is more than compensated for by resilience – they lamb without problem, don’t suffer from foot rot, their tails are skinny so don’t need dagging (shaving to prevent muck sticking to the wool which attracts egg-laying flies). And now, with the weather warming they are naturally moulting their fleeces – and we are spared the usual dilemma of either paying a shepherd over the odds to shear a diminutive flock or to do it ourselves with a long pair of scissors (quite tricky, not fun for either sheep or smallholders, and with results that are scruffy-looking at best).

With luck the black lamb in the picture (fathered by a black welsh mountain ram) will fatten slowly but steadily on a diet of grass and wild herbs in our fields, and will produce a satisfactory if not exactly ramboesque carcass, packed with flavour. Quality before quantity all the way!