Our garden in January

Today we had a lovely stay-at-home Sunday. Its exam time again (it seems to be exam time nearly all the time this year) and so a quiet day was in order. I took the opportunity to take a few photographs of the garden in January.

There was plenty of time to watch the chickens pecking their way around the garden.

I could spend ages watching Sage and Onion scratching about the garden, they have different habits and "personalities". Sage, the brown one, is the tamest of the two and every day when I sit on the bench in the garden she immediately jumps up to stand on my lap and spend three or four minutes grooming herself - maybe she's not being friendly perhaps she just wants something warm to stand on! Onion will stand on the bench beside me but that is close enough for her. The down side of letting them free range in the garden for most of the day is the amount of mess they cause. This photograph shows part of my lawn!

I'm not sure how well this is going to recover. At the moment the chickens are definitely pecking away at the grass far faster than it can grow but I am hoping that once the weather warms up a little that the balance might be restored and possibly that the grass might win over the chickens.

There are signs that plants are growing and that spring is round the corner. This is my first clump of snowdrops although they have been slightly hen-pecked too.

Not quite in flower yet, the first celandine.

Shrubs which flower in the winter often tend to be less showy than summer blooms but getting up close with the camera shows lots of detail that might be missed with just a quick glance.

Viburnum tinus.

Winter Jasmine.

Rosemary.

This my favourite of these photographs, I'd always thought rosemary had quite insignificant flowers until I saw all the details in close up.

The view from my kitchen window into the back garden looks very dull and muddy, it wasn't until I took my camera out and looked more closely that I noticed how much was out in flower even on a dull January day.