After a disappointing April that apparently forgot how to rain, early May has stepped up like a responsible friend who shows up with snacks. The narrow lanes are now a chaotic parade of bluebells, cow parsley, campions, and seeding stitchwort, all of which are being aggressively overtaken by ferns. The botanical lineup includes buckler, lady, hart’s-tongue, male, scaly male, and soft shield ferns - the last of which is unrolling its fronds like a fancy croissant - soon to be topped by rampant bracken, currently making out with bryony.

Hawthorn blossom is hanging over neglected hedgerows like festive bunting, and the beech trees have lost that fresh, see-through glow they get when they’re young and optimistic. The hedgebanks, battered and regularly shorn like a bad haircut, are nevertheless sprouting a diversity of greenery that suggests nature doesn’t care about grooming standards.

Before breakfast, your author wanders around a cool woodland garden where blackcaps are singing along with chiffchaffs, trying to outdo the wren’s piercing solo. The cherry, pear, and apple blossoms have all called it quits, much of it blown off by cold east winds before April could finish. The white foam of bullion cherries and the delicate pink of the venus pippin apple were short-lived but, you know, beautiful - like a celebrity marriage.

A sparse set of little green fruits is showing on the 30ft-high blizzard burcombe cherry, a tree named after surviving the 1891 storm. It was one of the first grafted by James, your author's brother-in-law, before he and sister Mary started their own orchard of local top fruit varieties. Family trees, literally.

In the fruit cage, your author removes tufts of bulbous grass and mulches around blueberry, blackcurrant, and gooseberry bushes. Cowslips, alpine strawberries, columbine, and alkanet are thriving there, and some are being dug up for spreading about. Meanwhile, a large grass snake is coiled in warmth beneath black plastic covering last year’s heap, living its best reptilian life.

Beyond the garden, wisteria, red hawthorns, azaleas, and the judas tree are blooming like they’re trying to win a floral Oscar. The last tree to leaf is the mulberry, which is apparently fashionably late to the party. South Devon cattle have been rotated since mid-April onto their summer keep across the way. Across the parish, pastures for bullocks and sheep, first-cut silage fields, and germinated cereals are all waiting for more rain to grow productively, because apparently England’s weather is still on a coffee break.